Our New Story – Kindred Mediahttp://kindredmedia.org
Sharing the New Story of Childhood, Parenthood, and the Human FamilyTue, 28 Nov 2017 00:08:31 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.9.1Stop Saying Kumbaya And Woo Woohttp://kindredmedia.org/2017/11/stop-saying-kumbaya-woo-woo/
http://kindredmedia.org/2017/11/stop-saying-kumbaya-woo-woo/#respondWed, 01 Nov 2017 04:34:22 +0000http://kindredmedia.org/?p=20655The dark grey pigeon plummeted to the earth, and landed squarely on the asphalt at the intersection of Cerrillos Road and Richards Avenue. His downy body lay lifeless in front of my car at the stoplight. “Did you see that?,” exclaimed my friend in the passenger seat. “He fell right out of the sky!” Undoubtedly, […]

]]>The dark grey pigeon plummeted to the earth, and landed squarely on the asphalt at the intersection of Cerrillos Road and Richards Avenue. His downy body lay lifeless in front of my car at the stoplight. “Did you see that?,” exclaimed my friend in the passenger seat. “He fell right out of the sky!” Undoubtedly, pigeons must die in mid-air on a regular basis, so this was not necessarily a strange occurrence, except for the fact that this was the ninth dead bird to appear in my life within a week.

The first was a hummingbird, outside our front door. Then a woodpecker in our barn. Next was a robin by the window. A raven under my favorite tree. A bat, a sparrow…

I’m not superstitious. But I have learned over the years in my profession to deeply listen and notice. I’m particularly curious when events conspire to provide numerous messages. What on earth would nine dead birds mean?

I spent the better part of the next few days contemplating the lesson—if there was one. My friend who had, along with me, witnessed the bird dropping out of the sky asked me what birds symbolized for me. I rambled through various meanings, but finally landed on a word that had weight.

She paused for a while. “Have you always felt the need to take flight?” she wisely queried.

“Indeed,” I replied ruefully, thinking of my failed marriages, and how I escaped my small-minded town during high school.

“And so, perhaps the dead birds indicate you no longer need to fly away any more,” she suggested.

The next day, sitting outside my home on a bench under a window, I began thinking about what my friend said. I wasn’t sure. Was I really safe enough in my life now, so I no longer needed to fly away? I was doubtful. I had always fiercely depended upon my skill to take flight when required.

At that very moment, a small wren collided hard against the window and dropped next to me, stunned. Now I was alarmed. Surely I must not be getting the message, because more birds were dying around me! As I sat next to the tiny creature, I considered the possibility of not flying away anymore, of grounding myself in my life’s circumstances without wings for escape. Of daring to trust my life as it was now, and staying put.

I wept.

At that moment, the bird opened her eyes, and flew away. No more dead birds.

In this way, life is constantly engaging with us. Sometimes it’s subtle, sometimes invisible, and sometimes it drags you by the hair and drop kicks you into waking up. I used to brush it off, but over the years I’ve learned to pay attention to events, scenarios, what shows up in any moment. Life is in concert with us, with all things, as one dynamic fluid expression. My dear friend, Lisa Reagan, journalist, co-founder of Kindred World (formerly Families for Conscious Living), and executive editor of Kindred calls it the “uni-verse” or the “one song.”

It’s not woo-woo. Though many might read my words and name it as such with an exaggerated eye roll. From physics to neuroscience, scientists agree—everything affects everything, because everything is connected. Physicist Fritjof Capra wrote, “Quantum theory thus reveals a basic oneness of the universe. It shows that we cannot decompose the world into independently existing smallest units. As we penetrate into matter, nature does not show us any isolated ‘building blocks,’ but rather appears as a complicated web of relations between the various parts of the whole.’

In his letter to a father who had lost a son, Albert Einstein consoled, “A human being is a part of the whole, called by us ‘Universe,’ a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest—a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness.”

Which brings me to the title of this post. For years I’ve heard my colleagues use the terms woo-woo or kumbaya, mostly with apology or dismissiveness. Ironically, I hear it from those on the front lines of human transformational development, who spend their lives in the realms of the invisible, the poetic and the mystical, opening these doors for others to walk through.

The message we inadvertently spread when we use woo-woo and kumbaya is that seeing holistically is ignorant and naive. We then play into the hands of the dominant paradigm that insists on separation and individualism.

So let’s dig down a little further. The feminine sensibilities of listening deeply, being present, understanding the quieter rhythms and timings of things, seeing between spaces, listening between lines, sensing into events, and recognizing connections, are powerful capacities available to both men and women.

We could argue that these capacities are what are urgently required for the real leadership needed to meet the challenges of a 21st century world. And yet, by saying these sensibilities are woo-woo, we keep its emergence at bay. We disparage the feminine. We perpetuate misogyny.

In the throws of #metoo and Weinstein, it’s time we extinguish all forms of contempt, abuse and prejudice against—not only women—but the feminine, in men and in women, in all its forms. It’s time that we hone our senses to an acuity that recognizes the barely perceptible ways that we keep misogyny alive by teasing, hiding, hassling and dismissing feminine ways of living and knowing.

And when we see people perpetuating those ways, then there’s another means with which to confront it. A more feminine approach. Instead of calling them out—instead of pointing fingers and putting them on the defensive—we can call them in. We can call them in to a way of seeing that is connected, whole and alive.

We can call them in to remembering.

We need to pierce the shame veil that would prevent us from sharing with another how you once heard a tree speak to you, or how you felt the stars move inside you under midnight sky, or how, when you were a child, you knew every animal was your brother or sister. We need to feel rooted in our confidence that when we tell a colleague we just “know” something, we are not being mysterious or weird, but powerful. We need to drop into our magical, mystical, visionary selves without apology.

When I began this post, I hesitated. Do I tell the bird story? Do I risk it? Such is the power of the mindset we live inside. Do not underestimate its pervasiveness, it’s corrosiveness, and it’s toxicity. If we are to create uncommon and innovative solutions to our challenges, we need to call forth the feminine, and her way of being, in all of us. We need to stop saying woo-woo and kumbaya and new age, and any other disparaging term that implies weakness.

And we need to walk out into the night, and hear the stars speak our true name. And the elk bugle to our soul through the crisp fall air. “You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves,” writes poet Mary Oliver, “…the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting—over and over announcing your place in the family of things.”

* End note: At the very moment I began to wrap up this blog, my partner, Scott, came to me with a gift from one of our clients. We opened the small box. Inside was a fetish (a Zuni Indian stone carving) of a beautiful marble moose with turquoise inlay. The card read: Moose represents primal feminine energies. Moose is one of the most ancient of the power totems, associated with instinct, wisdom and feminine strengths.

]]>http://kindredmedia.org/2017/11/stop-saying-kumbaya-woo-woo/feed/0Parenting For A Peaceful World Goes To China: An Update With Robin Grillehttp://kindredmedia.org/2017/09/parenting-peaceful-world-goes-china-update-robin-grille/
http://kindredmedia.org/2017/09/parenting-peaceful-world-goes-china-update-robin-grille/#respondFri, 15 Sep 2017 18:54:00 +0000http://kindredmedia.org/?p=19166Caption: An EDiversity mother in Hong Kong shares her experience of discovering Parenting for a Peaceful World during her challenges with breastfeeding her child. Watch the full video below of EDiversity mothers talking about Parenting for a Peaceful World. Then listen to Robin Grille share his response to the book’s translation by the Hong Kong homeschooling […]

]]>Caption: An EDiversity mother in Hong Kong shares her experience of discovering Parenting for a Peaceful World during her challenges with breastfeeding her child. Watch the full video below of EDiversity mothers talking about Parenting for a Peaceful World. Then listen to Robin Grille share his response to the book’s translation by the Hong Kong homeschooling group as well as ten years of insights and travels with the seminal book.

About the Interview With Robin Grille

Artist Carrie Chau poses with the cover painting for 【善養小童成大同】Parenting for a Peaceful World by Robin Grille

Robin Grille shares his journey with a homeschooling group in Hong Kong, EDiversity, who have fought for Parenting for a Peaceful World to be translated into Catonese and distributed in China in 2017. Robin shares his insight into cultural changes happening in China and around the world at this time. He believes the “backlash” experience to the dying dominator and authoritarian models (Old Story) of parenting, education, culture, and government are breeding last gasp grabs for power as humanity’s New Story emerges.

Robin covers his talk at the UNICEF Baby Friendly Initiative in England and his presentation at the Healthy Birth, Healthy Earth Sumit at Findhorn, Scotland. He throws in the kitchen sink with insights from PFPW, guidance from his book Heart-to-Heart Parenting, and his admonition to all activists to “not look for predictions of the future but to set their intentions for how they want it to be” and work in that direction together.

Robin is a contributor editor to Kindred and a co-creator of its Children’s Wellbeing Manifesto. This is a fun and epic interview with one of the most celebrated thought leaders of the conscious parenting movement.

Watch EDiversity mothers talk about their excitement about reading Parenting for a Peaceful World together. Click Closed Caption option for translation:

PARENTING FOR A PEACEFUL WORLD GOES TO CHINA!

A TRANSCRIPT OF THE ABOVE AUDIO INTERVIEW

LISA REAGAN: Welcome to Kindred Media and Community. This is Lisa Reagan and today I am talking with Robin Grille, author of Parenting for a Peaceful World and Heart-to-Heart Parenting. Robin’s book Parenting for a Peaceful World is slated to be translated into Cantonese and distributed in China next year by EDiversity (see their video above). Today, we’re going to cover the origins of the book, how it has been received worldwide in the past eleven years, and where Robin has traveled with his message recently. So welcome, Robin.

ROBIN GRILLE: Hi, Lisa, it is really good to be speaking with you again. It has been a while.

LISA REAGAN: It has been a while. We have a big update ahead of us and I look forward to sharing all of your great news with everyone.

ROBIN GRILLE: Well, that was just a really lovely surprise to receive a communication from a group that I was not aware of their existence. They are a very, very vibrant homeschooling group in Hong Kong. They call themselves EDiversity. I think it probably stands for educational diversity.

They are part of a backlash I suppose you could say against a real high pressure cooker-style of education that seems to predominate in East Asia, in China, in Korea, or in Japan: long hours, extraordinary amounts of homework, and enormous pressure to perform highly. You know, things are so competitive. There are ways of dysfunction that comes from that. Kids that are just breaking down psychologically and it results in all kinds of things including bullying, like high rates of bullying, school refusal.

So against that background is this wonderful, progressive, incredibly dynamic group of families that are banding together around the book and just protecting their right to educate as they want at home. They are really educated parents. They are all professional. A lot of them are teachers and they are just putting their foot down and saying “no more of that for my child.” So somehow, somebody there got ahold of my book.

You know, this is the age of the internet I guess and nothing is hidden anymore. They were so enthused by my book Parenting for a Peaceful World and the sense of the manifesto that it provides for reform of child-rearing and education and the difference that is already making in the world. So they tried really hard to find me a publisher in the Chinese world. We had a few publishers turn us down. I tell you, they were absolutely relentless, relentless. There was never going to be a plan that they gave up.

LISA REAGAN: Wow.

ROBIN GRILLE: I am quite blown away, really, by the enthusiasm and the hunger and the determination to make change. They see my book as one of the tools that they really want in their arsenal. I also started having mixed feelings because I began to learn that for my book to go into mainland China, I don’t think that it would have the respect of a faithful translation and I think that my message was very much at risk of being diluted or edited or changed and there is no way in the world that I want to live with that. I would rather the book just be put to sleep before somebody puts a different message to my name. I said no, no more, I don’t even want that to happen. If my book never makes it into mainland China, then you know, that’s okay by me. But we came to an arrangement where EDiversity have become the publisher and in their hands, I trust them implicitly, explicitly, unblinkingly. They have my absolute faith. I know them. They’re good people. You know, they’re fierce. Gosh, it’s such a joy to work with them. They had to raise the money by crowd funding.

LISA REAGAN: Oh, wonderful.

ROBIN GRILLE: Because they really want to print by demand. They want to have stock of the book on paper. They’ve got wonderful people helping out and donating and backing it and beautiful artists and who said, “Look, I’ll provide the artwork for the cover, etc.” What a great pleasure. It is going to be in Cantonese. You know, China is not just China. The Chinese speaking world is everywhere. You have got them in Indonesia, Malaysia, parts of Africa, all over North America, as you know, Australia, New Zealand. There are Cantonese speakers everywhere. So I am really thrilled.

The West Imports Tiger Mom as The East Now Imports Conscious Parenting

ROBIN GRILLE: Oh, wow, Lisa, that’s exactly what is happening in Australia. I am hearing from school teachers that say, we don’t really believe in giving homework to primary school children. We don’t like it, we don’t agree with it, but we just get so much pressure from our immigrant families from East Asia who get angry with us if we are not giving enough homework and if we’re not really getting on the kids and pushing them hard. So there’s a lot of this cultural change that is going in that direction driven by immigration and – you’re right – that at the same time, in the mean time in East Asia, they’re saying we’re sick of this. We don’t want to become American or English, nor should they ever be, but the way that they’re freeing themselves from their traditions is in their own style and there is a great hunger and drive for democratizing family and school.

Now, the thing that I am really fascinated by is the growing sense that I have been given that there is something a little bit like the 1960s going on in China, that is growing and developing. There is a tremendous hunger for new ideas that break with the old. There is a new way of doing gender relationship and new ways of doing politics and new ways of doing everything. They are not just going to copy what happens in California or New York right in the 1960s, so you’re not going to get the same kind of thing; they’re going to do their own thing. That’s exactly what we would want. But it means that some big changes are at foot and boy are they hungry for new and they will take it from anywhere in the world where it serves them.

I have spoken to writers and therapists in the western world who are being discovered in China and being taken from. They take the ball and they run with it. You know, we got to wonder. We have got to be curious about what is that going to do to Chinese society? What can we extrapolate here? Because you know from my book that you cannot change childhood without changing all of society afterwards. It’s just one leads to the other.

LISA REAGAN: Well, let me just pause right here, because this is what I want to do just in case anyone listening is unfamiliar with Parenting for a Peaceful World. If you could just give us a quick overview of it and then go back to telling us how you see it impacting Chinese culture and families potentially.

ROBIN GRILLE: Do you mean what would I hope for or what my dream is?

LISA REAGAN: What would you hope for?

ROBIN GRILLE: Yeah. The first thing that I need is as much humility as you can deliver in a truck because they will do what they do. They will do what they do. The only way that they will do it is in their own way because there is no other way. And having said that, whatever is authoritarian, whatever is authoritarian in families and in school becomes toxically authoritarian in government and in business and I would like to see that dissolve in China in the same way that I want to see that disappear more and more and more from every other country in the world, every other culture.

Because authoritarianism and patriarchy is at the very center of what is causing us to destroy our planet and to put ourselves at risk of self destruction too. All of our problems can be traced down to that at its very center. The interpersonal dynamic of power over, one person having power over another is corrupt and it is violent and only violence and corruption can come from it in the end.

So, if somebody in the Chinese universe can use my book as a part of a library of resources for neuro-social evolution that can remove authoritarianism and every fear in human life, I would be ecstatic about that, absolutely ecstatic. I think the whole world would benefit. People in the west have become accustomed to speaking about China in fearful terms and, you know, we think of China and we want to think of this gigantic population that will export all kinds of bad stuff – Chinese arms race and building islands in the Pacific where they will station their Navy and all of that kind of stuff.

And I think that awful kind of fantasy is predicated on the assumption that everything is going to stay exactly the same as it is now and that societies do not evolve. I think we need to take pause and look because there is a social revolution going on in China and really, my book just kind of got vacuumed into that as one grain of sand that is part of the much larger picture. So that is really something to watch and something to be very excited by. Authoritarianism in politics will not stand. It cannot stand when families start to live and expect kind of a more democratic life. Change does not come from above. It actually comes from the ground up. It is happening. It is starting to happen.

LISA REAGAN: I don’t want to derail us too much with any kind of political grenade, but here in America we have the reality show of an authoritarian-from-hell running for the most powerful position in the world, the United States President. We could spend hours talking about how did that happen.

ROBIN GRILLE: Yeah.

LISA REAGAN: I do actually recommend anybody listening can go to Kindredmedia.org and Suzanne Zeedyk of the University of Scotland has written about that person running for presidency as a symptom of authoritarianism. I think I am just going to leave it there. (See Zeedyk’s work here. Read Grille’s Trump insights here.)

ROBIN GRILLE: Well, but it does, what you’re talking about Lisa, I am glad you brought that up and it’s not separate, it is completely part of what we’re talking about to do with how child-rearing reforms drive in your future. The presidential horror that is happening in your country is not too different from what is happening in Australia, I assure you of that. It is exactly the same thing playing out in slightly different ways and the same in parts of Europe and the UK. I am pretty sure that what’s going on is that we’re living in a moment of backlash. You could easily take Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, not just as individuals who are struggling, but as symbols, for a much larger struggle that is going on around the world at the moment, because what happens when the new grows to a particular size, it starts to become enough of a stretch and the old begins to die and everybody that clings to the old starts to get extremely threatened and will therefore become more organized and more resistant and more violent for a while.

The Trump Phenomenon Started With Childhoods, By Robin Grille

You’re seeing as the world becomes more loving, as people stop giving allegiance to these kinds of delusions of separation – like you identify with a tribe or you identify with a country, or you identify with a race. And by the way there is no such thing as a race. There are no races, genetically speaking, there is no such thing as black or white.

LISA REAGAN: Right, right.

ROBIN GRILLE: It’s really a cognitive condition. I mean, there are cultures and there are cultures and ethnicity too and we should value and we should really appreciate that, but you can’t draw a line around it. It’s completely nonsensical. But somehow, we tend to divide up into these gangs. But that’s dying. It’s dying. If you are the sort of person that is highly identified with a nation or with a race or a religion, boy is that under threat right now because people are loving each other and mixing. The internet and other forces are making these boundaries and identities increasingly meaningless, you know. So in a way, as racism disappears, you are seeing more racism, because there is a backlash from the old. It is getting worse for a while. It is a perilous time, but there is a context for that backlash.

Authoritarian Old Story Death Rattle While New Story Emerges

LISA REAGAN: The context part. That is what I deeply deeply appreciate about Parenting for a Peaceful World. I bring that up all the time and have since the book came out. Please look at this book in order to see the context of what you’re doing. Why are you feeling conflicted perhaps in your parenting choices? Is it because as Joseph Chilton Pearce, the Grandfather of the Conscious Parenting Movement, said, “We have cultural imperatives telling us one thing and our biological imperatives driving us in another direction towards wellness for our children and we end up in this bio-cultural conflict” is what he called it. Your book is the only book that I know of that allows us to take that journey and to come away feeling, I think, very positive about where we are right now if you have enough context.

ROBIN GRILLE: Uhm, yeah. It is important to understand that whenever there is a big leap forward in social evolution, immediately you will see a backlash. Because people will sometimes defend their identity even more than they will defend their biology. People will die for a belief even if that belief is toxic. But if the belief is something you believe in you feel very threatened. I think what is at war right now is two opposite styles of parenting. I don’t want to label the issue, but it is useful to use the Donald Trump versus Bernie Sanders, and I know Bernie Sanders is not a presidential candidate, but he is really representing the new. He is representing a new form of society in every way. Far more than Hillary as you all know. I don’t have to tell you that.

If I see that, they are representing two radically different styles of parenting that they both come from. Imagine the childhood that Donald Trump would have had and imagine the childhood that Bernie Sanders had. Imagine the childhood of the most rabid Donald Trump supporters and how rigid and closed off they are mentally and imagine the childhood of the most devoted and committed Bernie Sanders supporters. One is heavily authoritarian. The other is much more dialectical and democratic. That’s what at stake.

There is a battle of two different styles of society and two different styles of parenting and the reason that battle is really coming to a head right now is that the new has become so large that the old is really afraid and it is sticking to its guns in a very very literal sense of sticking to its guns. There’s going to be some trouble I think for a while.

LISA REAGAN: So in addition to Parenting for a Peaceful World going into China now, you have been on the road for the last year and you have taken your message of the neuro-social evolution as you call it to the UNICEF Baby Friendly Conference in London last year and then you were just in Findhorn in Scotland, which was one of the most spectacular looking conferences I’ve seen, the Healthy Birth Healthy Earth conference, for those of you who don’t know what Findhorn is, I’m just going to let Robin, you can just tell us about both. I am looking for hopeful, positive directions. This nebulous conscious parenting movement that seems to be happening sometimes and other times, I wonder. But if I follow you around, it looks like, yes, there is movement.

ROBIN GRILLE: Yeah. Again, just a very quick correction. The UNICEF Baby Friendly Hospital Conference, Baby Friendly Initiative, it is called. That UNICEF conference was was in Harrogate, which is in the North of England. There were about 750 delegates there from all over the world. That was 2015 in November.

LISA REAGAN: That’s cool.

ROBIN GRILLE: Just now, we got back from Findhorn, as you were saying, which is just the most magnificent and the most dynamic and so well established intentional community. It is quite large. There must be I think hundreds of people living there.

Apart from the fact that it is a magical place environmentally, it is a beautiful environment and little townships around the place in the North of Scotland, it is a fantastic model for living sustainably. They grow their own food organically. They cook the most beautiful stuff. They are so in tune with their natural environment. It is a very very peaceful place. They generate their own electricity. They have wind turbines. They collect their own water and recycle their own water. They share a very small pool of electric cars, fully electric cars. It feels good just being there.

The UNICEF conference addressed the drive to restore breastfeeding and their concern is human health. My concern is human health plus, that it is not too simplistic to say that you can breastfeed the world back to peace, because with enough people being breastfed in a loving way, it irrevocably changes the neurology of the child and primes the child’s body and neurology and biochemistry. It primes the body of that child towards easier access to blissful states of connectedness and loving relationships to both the human and non-human world. There is a chemical pathway that you can track that explains everything that I just said. It is not that breastfeeding is everything, but boy is it a powerful element in the creation of a loving world.

LISA REAGAN: The baby friendly initiative features ten steps as guides for hospitals, for example, in the US, to conform to help with the bonding and the breastfeeding piece, but as you were saying earlier about this being a time of backlash, there were blogs out there by the dozens by mothers saying that your baby friendly hospital is not mother friendly, stop hounding me to bond and breastfeed my baby. The reason they’re saying this in the US is because we don’t have paid parental leave. We don’t. I have read a couple of these and I have felt with them very heartbroken at the idea of what they’re saying is, ” I am not going to breastfeed and bond with my baby and then two weeks from now, drop them off at daycare and go to work a job so that I can put food on the table.” This is a survival question. So the idea of bonding and breastfeeding is almost emotional suicide: “Don’t ask me to do this.”

ROBIN GRILLE: Yeah, that’s right. What it does is it doesn’t make mothers feel guilty, that’s the wrong thing to say, but mothers end up making themselves feel guilty when they’re confronted with the truth of this is necessary for you and your baby and if you don’t get the right support, this will fail you. I do my best to try to urge mothers to stop feeling guilty and start getting angry.

ROBIN GRILLE: The world is doing something wrong to you because if you had the right support and sufficient support, you wouldn’t really need to be pushed into breastfeeding. You would be carried into a very delicious stated of connectedness through that process. Don’t get guilty and don’t blame the messenger. That’s just dumb. Get angry!

LISA REAGAN: Get angry!

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ROBIN GRILLE: That makes more sense. There is a tremendous backlash of guilt and it’s around the world I am seeing exactly the same pattern wherever I travel and so of course, the thing is, this ten step initiative from the World Health Organization and from UNICEF. It is not sufficient and it is not enough. We need more public policy that really supports families. Just because something is not enough, it doesn’t mean that it isn’t absolutely necessary.

The reason why, when you look at the history of this, the reason why the ten step baby friendly hospital initiative was put into place is because there has been an absolute war against breastfeeding from the gigantic and spectacularly profitable drug cartels. I would like to call them, the pharmaceutical companies, that lie through their teeth and will allow all kinds of human dysfunction to happen. They don’t care as long as they can sell more artificial baby formula. That has been a planetary campaign to destroy breastfeeding because breastfeeding is competition. Breastfeeding mothers can do free of charge and it means that they’re not buying a product that is immensely profitable for the shareholders.

When you look at the relentless and international unstopping incredibly aggressive and vicious campaign from artificial formula companies to destroy breastfeeding around the world, no wonder there is so much urgency to bring it back. But I really agree that mothers need more than a ten step process in the hospital. Mothers need support to be able to take their babies with them where they go.

LISA REAGAN: Robin, let me share quickly with the listener, two resources on Kindredmedia.org. One is your UNICEF talk It is over an hour long, by the way. The second piece is, there is a new book out there called Unlatched that covers exactly what you’re talking about here: the history of the war on breastfeeding. A review of that book by Darcia Narvaez is at Kindredmedia.org.

ROBIN GRILLE: Thank you for that. Yeah, the whole story is there. So who are the breastfeeding nazis? The breastfeeding nazis are the people that took it away and sold you the lie in its place. It really horrifies me how that has been done to an entire species, really? So, but it is slowly coming back. Then you asked about Findhorn, did you want me to speak to that a little?

The Global Emergence of New Story – at Findhorn and Elsewhere

LISA REAGAN: Yes. Yeah. Oh gosh, yeah. Findhorn. Tell everybody, it is this beautiful Scottish castle and then it is surrounded by an eco-village and they have this Healthy Birth, Healthy Earth conference there that you attended and spoke at just last month.

ROBIN GRILLE: Yeah, the Findhorn Foundation is this wonderful community and it is so lovely. I’ve known of it since I was about 11 years old. I started reading books about Findhorn. They’ve been around since I think the late 50s and 60s. There have been many books written about them and now it is like an international education facility. There are all things to do with new ways of society and sustainable living, healing practices, etc. It is very vibrant and dynamic. This conference was called Healthy Birth, Healthy Earth, which is in recognition of that. It is somewhat of how we should treat the planet and non-human family and non-human brothers and sisters and I guess I really want to refer to nature as family, you know. It helps me to remember that I’m connected and we’re connected and we’re not here to use the place. We’re here to belong.

LISA REAGAN: Yes.

See Robin Grille at Climate Change and Consciousness: Our Legacy for the Earth!

ROBIN GRILLE: And the way that we treat the earth is deeply deeply affected, deeply influenced by the way that we are born into the earth and the way that mothers and fathers are treated in their mother’s wombs and the way when we are born and those first few magical moments of life outside the womb in which so much imprinting happens and so much bonding becomes possible. There is just an extremely magical natural plan. I think of it as the love potion. You know the old the fairy tale as the love potion, when you drink it, you fall in love with the first person you see, you know that’s archetype.

That is a myth that is allegorical or it is a metaphor for exactly what the design is for the birth of the human child because in natural birth, the flaws of ecstatic hormones are torrential. There is never enough a moment in the human lifespan that there is so much of that flow and the design is there that we look for the mother’s eyes, we connect visually. The naturally born child is quite awake and alert. The design is to fall head over heals in absolute physical love with one unique and irreplaceable specific individual. Attachment is about specific individuals. We connect with this one person and it’s mother. Dad at the beginning comes a very very close second. That’s the beginning. That’s the foundation of emotional intelligence. That deeply influences the way that we grow into connecting or failing to connect with the life force that surrounds us as we grow and really the way that we devastate and exploit this planet with absolute impunity to the point of putting our own lives catastrophically at risk is just a no brainer given the violence under which the majority of people are born.

And that, Lisa… this conference was with obstetricians, midwives, and doulas, and medical anthropologists examining the state of affairs in natural birth how that is going around the world and industrial obstetric birth. There is always a need for obstetrics and it can be lifesaving in extreme circumstances, but it is… that is not what obstetrics is about in the way that it is being used today and I came out of that conference both very thrilled with the people I met and the things that I learned and the love that it is in this international movement to reform childbirth, but I also came away deeply disturbed by how violating regularly childbirth is around the world and very frightened for what this is doing for the collective human consciousness.

LISA REAGAN: Yes, so we just had an uptick in maternal morbidity rates in the US. That was in New York Times this month, big study that came out and showed that. We were already at the bottom of the pack for maternal and infant wellness against all developed countries here in the US. It’s out of control. It’s getting worse. When I look out to see discussions around what can we do, I was so thrilled to see the Healthy Birth Healthy Earth Conference, because I don’t see us creating more medical models to address this. It’s got to be way outside the box with a different paradigm and from a different place.

ROBIN GRILLE: Yeah. Yeah. I cannot exaggerate the violence that it does to families and to the beginning of the human life to hit it with our defenses in industrial obstetrics. I call it industrial because it is a huge amount of business involved money.

LISA REAGAN: Right.

ROBIN GRILLE: And machinery that is used way way way past where it is actually required and I was absolutely gobsmacked to discover how radically unsupported by anything scientific this is. There is no science behind hospital policy to attack the mother’s body with these machines in a way that just really really hits the baby very hard as well as the mother. No wonder we have the kind of postnatal depression rates that we have and it is hurting human consciousness. It is making it more detached and disconnected.

LISA REAGAN: Right from the beginning.

ROBIN GRILLE: Because you effect at a time of huge vulnerability and there is a biological expectation for great blissful bonding and delicious bonding at that very window of opportunity, we’re radically altering the biochemical bias that the baby’s neurology swims in and we are priming the brain of the baby towards dis-associative states and that stays with you.

LISA REAGAN: Yes.

ROBIN GRILLE: That stays with you. Unless it is some great great healing that comes later in life, which is highly possible, but if it doesn’t, we stay disassociated, detached, and there is a whole range. If you look at the Primal Health Database, there are tens of thousands of studies looking at the impact in every area of human wellness.

ROBIN GRILLE: Yes. Absolutely. Michel Odent, MD. I mean, he is not writing this. He just has got a thing that collects peer-reviewed articles from medical and psychiatric journals. I mean the evidence is absolutely in the bucket loads. Absolute A-Z of human dysfunctions psychological and neuropsychological that can last a life of a result of this really atrocious way that we are birthing children in this earth. I mean I am talking about rates of cesarean in some countries in South America that are up to 80%.

LISA REAGAN: Yeah.

ROBIN GRILLE: There is no, I mean, that is just an outrage. There is no excuse for that. 80% cesarean, that is rubbish. I am only just talking that is just the tip of the iceberg. We do have a problem on our hands. Alot of other things are getting better. This is getting worse. So I have to say that I was moved by the conference. I was, you know, profoundly honored to be there and to contribute and I was also very disturbed and I have come away with a sense of great urgency. We’re not going to change politics by voting differently. We need to start from the ground up and the first place to change is how mothers and fathers are treated around pregnancy and birth and how babies are born. That’s even deeper than the whole attachment revolution that is very well understood now.

There has been a taboo when it comes to talking about childbirth. It is time to lift that taboo and to recognize the urgency and to get busy. I will also tell you that in the middle of my despair about this whole issue, I have also been very heartened to discover that there are big moves too. This is a recognizable human rights issue. This is not just… this is no longer kind of just mothers who are activists for natural birth. There are human rights lawyers, obstetricians and midwives and medical anthropologists, so a very broad range of professions, who decided to roll their sleeves up.

This has been made into a human rights question, a human right to be born naturally unless there is a really really clear and incontrovertible need for medical intervention. It is a human right to have your psychological needs thoroughly met at the prenatal and perinatal stage because there is a need for blissful connectedness as we enter into the outside world. That’s the plan. That is the natural plan. Nature does not like to be messed around with as we all know. That stuff comes at a great cost. We don’t mess with that stuff. I have discovered these human rights activists. I shouldn’t say I’ve discovered them. I have come to this very late. I have been told about this recently. They had big big conferences. The last one was in The Hague, Netherlands, and the next one was in India in 2017. I think they’re called Childbirth and Human Rights.

ROBIN GRILLE: Yeah, you do that really well, thank you Lisa. I am glad that you are putting those resources out. As many people as possible need to find those out and we all need to get vocal. This effects everybody. It doesn’t matter even if you don’t have any children and never will and don’t want to, that’s absolutely fine, but it effects everybody because you know, I can say it again until I am blue in the mouth but what we do to children is what they will do to the planet when they grow up.

LISA REAGAN: Yes, that is very close to being a Pam Leo quote, “How we treat the child, the child will treat the earth.”

ROBIN GRILLE: I famously misquoted Pam Leo there. But she put that quote there better than anyone else. But all credit to Pam Leo.

The Post-Joseph Chilton Pearce World: The Lack of Science In Public Policy

LISA REAGAN: But then there is Thomas Verny, who was one of the founders of Birth Psychology, and his quote is, “Womb ecology becomes world ecology.” So he takes it back even further. He takes it to what we know about what’s going on in the womb as the child is being formed. The brain is selecting for how should I live in this world? Is my mother terrified? Do I need to forget about creative thinking and go for the amygdala development? We know that is what is happening now in utero.

There is a wonderful, by the way, In Utero documentary out there, so on one hand, when I talk to you, I feel like there is so much coming forward now, and this is the purpose of Kindred – to try to help everyone have a place to go where they can see what is happening because there is so much across different fields. As you were saying, all of these different professional representing different fields are coming forward to take this message back out in their professions. But this kind of leads me where I wanted to end with you and that is, Joseph Chilton Pearce passed in August 2016 and I did get to see him before he passed and I know we have a wonderful interview with you sitting in rocking chairs talking with Joe.

ROBIN GRILLE: I’ll never forget it. I’ll never forget that.

LISA REAGAN: So Joe’s work began in the 70s and, I didn’t want to be naive or simplistic and say, “how are we doing since then” because the world is changing and is so much more complex, but it is very frustrating today, looking at the gap between science and public policy, so what do you think overall? It seems like a critical time, but…?

ROBIN GRILLE: Yeah, look, I’ve got two thoughts about that question… On the one hand, I think we need to be respectful of the sense that we are living in an ice age moment. So there are no predictions to be made right now. That it’s all going to be okay or that it won’t be. Right now, I would like everybody to not look for a prediction. Don’t let life happen, you happen to life. So let’s turn this into intention rather than prediction.

Everyone has a unique gift to contribute and a unique voice and a unique calling and what will I put into, you know, the drive towards cultural creativism and the neuro-social evolution and a new world. But at the same time, I think there is a lot of reason for great hope because while there is a backlash going on and a backlash would be pretty terrible and I have already spoken about that and we are seeing it politically around the world, not just in the United States.

The things that are growing are in terms of a whole new way of organizing society and relating to the environment. There is so much of that going on. In moments of despair when we think, is it worth it? We really need to go out and look for that stuff, because that is what refuels and re-encourages you to keep doing the reform work that we all need to do. We need to change birthing. We need to change early childhood and we need to really change education and then at the same time change how we make things and how we grow things, our food and stuff, etc. It is happening. It is really really happening on so many levels. You know, in my books and in my talks, and in my articles, etc, I talk about spectacular changes in even Hong Kong is starting to do homeschooling and they are resisting homework, etc. These changes are coming and it is reflected in the way that I am continually finding new and incredibly thrilling things in the world of business and in the world of the manufacturer and the world of growing food. There is a kind of a movement away from the straight line towards the circle. I could give you examples. I do not want to leave it too abstract, so I want to give you some examples.

LISA REAGAN: Sure.

Expanding Human Potential by Supporting Those Who Care For Children

ROBIN GRILLE: Look, if you had ten hours, I could speak about this for eleven hours. The abundance of exciting things, but it is important to know, but it is not like we had one kind of, you know, we don’t have a Nelson Mandela or a Ghandi that will come and save us and it is all busy work. Most of the good things that go on, you won’t know they are there until you go looking for them. So you need to do that so we don’t despair.

One of the things that I am absolutely wrapped in is the work of William McDonough, designer and architect who has been immensely and internationally powerful at re-articulating the absolute core philosophy of how human beings should make things because we are the apes that make things. He said that up until now, we had been using a linear model, which he calls take, make and discard. You take something out of nature which is kind of a violating, it is a theft. You rip it out, like you mine it out. You make a hole or you chop it out or something. Then you make some stuff. You use it and you chuck it. You make a mess. You make a toxic waste dump from it, which is poisonness to the earth.

At every stage, that is a violent destructive process. Now a lot of people think that’s just what humanity is. No it’s not. Living in this linear productive fashion is a symptom.The violence that has been done to us in childhood has become the violence that we do to the environment and we get cognitively trapped in that under the delusion that is the only way – and I promise you that is absolutely rubbish. Here we are with the work of people like William McDonough and many others who have re-articulated the circular economy where you don’t mine the earth anymore, you mine whole things. Now I think about this and it makes me feel quite ecstatic. Everything is in a circle. There is absolutely no technological reason why everything, absolutely everything cannot be 101% recyclable, reusable, upcyclable. There is now an international, it is called a cradle to cradle certification.

If you make a product, it doesn’t matter what it is, a car, a chair, a television, a lawn mower, if you make that product in a way that makes it at least 95% recyclable and if you can prove that you are treating your workers really fairly and equitably, so around the entire circle, everything is sustainable and loving and there is a filter that you must pass through, then you get this international rating of cradle to cradle. I am now sitting on my cradle to cradle certified task chair, an office chair. Made in the United States. It is my favorite thing that I own. I am in love with it. It is intensely comfortable and when it falls apart one day. It hasn’t even started to. I’ve had it for several years. When it falls apart, I can dismantle it in ten minutes and every single item is 100% recyclable. That’s a model for the economy for the whole world.

LISA REAGAN: Yeah, yeah. I know you’re talking about things and products right now, but I always like to point out when we get to that place of moving into materialism that this is based on either, as you say, the linear, take, make, and discard, or the circle, which is a symbol for wisdom, and what sociologists like Paul Ray say is the purpose of those people that you just called on to live intentionally instead of waiting for somebody to predict what is going to happen for them to start living intentionally. This whole wisdom model, I love it. This is wonderful. This is where the quality of our consciousness comes into play.

ROBIN GRILLE: It really does. Yeah. The circle applies to everything. I’m not just talking about the chair I’m sitting on. This is really growing around the world. I don’t know if you’re aware, for instance, but Sweden has run out of garbage. They have a crisis in so far as they’re not producing enough rubbish. Can you believe that?

Heart-to-Heart Parenting: It’s About Heart Pleasure

LISA REAGAN: Two things, I want to wrap up our hour together, but I again, want to leave our reader with resources. Could you talk a little bit about Heart-to-Heart Parenting? Because I think this is a resource for where you want to go, whereas Parenting for a Peaceful World can show you culturally where we’ve been, but you do have a path out and you have created that path. I also want to mention the virtual retreat “Inner Child”. So we have resources for our listeners.

ROBIN GRILLE: Yeah. You guys have got fantastic resources. In my book, the difference between my two books, a lot of people do use Parenting for a Peaceful World as a parenting resource, but it also has a lot of this sociology and psycho-history and you know, it is kind of a social progressive sort of handbook. Teachers use it a lot. School teachers and all kinds of health practitioners as a textbook.

Even though it is not written as a textbook, the language is designed to flow and be easy to read, but it is very heavily referenced to science. The other book, Heart-to-Heart Parenting, is much more conversational and more concerned with just the family relationships. It is much more personal. It is what our children need from inside the womb all the way to primary school age even though some of the communication skills that are shown in the book can apply to, you know, our relationships to children of any age, 17, 25-year-old, your partner. But it also, in looking at early childhood in particular, it also, that book looks very very much at the needs that parents have. You were talking earlier about how it is very hard for mothers to discover that baby’s need breastfeeding if mothers aren’t at the same time being given the kind of support they need.

Heart-to-Heart Parenting doesn’t put the baby first, it puts the whole family first. Feed the parents so that the baby can be fed. The goal of that book as a parenting manual is a more pleasurable life.

LISA REAGAN: So not child or parent centric, but family.

ROBIN GRILLE: Pleasure is kind of the guiding… and by pleasure I don’t mean hedonism. I mean heart pleasure. I am talking about bliss and I’m talking about joy. That’s the guide. I think a deep state of contentment, joy, and even bliss and ecstasy are symptoms of connectedness. As we understand what drives human connectedness in our communication, we can open our hearts to each other. You know, when you start feeling like you are really enjoying the process of parenting, not just trying to get it right, but really really enjoying it, right there is your feedback, your biofeedback that you have found your places of connectedness, that shifts and changes through the different developmental stages of your childhood. Right there, that is what Heart-to-Heart Parenting is about. I want the pursuit of happiness. That is too humble of thing. We need to add an extra amendment to the bill of rights, Lisa.

LISA REAGAN: You cut out just a tad. You cut out just a little bit right there. What about the bill of rights?

ROBIN GRILLE: We need to add a new amendment to the bill of rights, Lisa.

LISA REAGAN: Oh, a new amendment, okay.

ROBIN GRILLE: Because I think the pursuit of happiness is too humble a thing to ask for. It is the… I am thinking about the human right to the ecstatic peak experiences moments of bliss in our life. It is the pursuit of bliss in our life. It is the biological birth right that is designed into every human body. Let’s add that in. It is important and necessary.

LISA REAGAN: Well, I love it. I love bliss and ecstasy a lot better than happiness in the US has been marketed as something you buy. I don’t know that word has a whole lot of meaning that it used to have to it. It is more of an anxiety word. How can you be happy? How can you be happy? Why aren’t you happy?

ROBIN GRILLE: It is co-opted by commercial interests, you know. You will be happy. Happiness comes from property. Never a bigger lie was ever told. Everyone says you can be rich and not happy and still no one listens. That’s not entirely true though. People are starting to listen to that more and more. But yeah, absolutely. The pursuit of blissful connectedness, let’s call it that.

LISA REAGAN: There we go. Well, thank you so much, Robin, for giving us a tour of where you’ve been and where Parenting for a Peaceful World is going. That is all really wonderful news and I can’t wait to talk again so we can see what is happening there with E. Diversity in Hong Kong that’s bringing the book then into China. I want to ask everyone to go to Kindredmedia.org again because we have a whole collection of Robin’s Parenting for a Peaceful World videos and as you can see from his tour here a few years ago, we have lots more in the hopper that will one day make it to the site and yes, that’s a plea for donations that you can also do on the site. So thank you again, Robin.

]]>http://kindredmedia.org/2017/09/parenting-peaceful-world-goes-china-update-robin-grille/feed/0Normal Is Over – A New Documentary Filmhttp://kindredmedia.org/2017/07/normal-new-documentary-film/
http://kindredmedia.org/2017/07/normal-new-documentary-film/#respondSat, 29 Jul 2017 17:10:53 +0000http://kindredmedia.org/?p=20513Normal Is Over The Movie (103)_ENG from ReneeScheltema on Vimeo. Award-winning feature documentary about humanity’s wisest responses to climate change, species extinction, resource depletion and the widening gap between the rich and poor. First film connecting the dots: A look at the financial and economical paradigm underlying our planetary problems, while offering various SOLUTIONS to […]

Award-winning feature documentary about humanity’s wisest responses to climate change, species extinction, resource depletion and the widening gap between the rich and poor.

Book a screening from anywhere in the world for your local community.

First film connecting the dots: A look at the financial and economical paradigm underlying our planetary problems, while offering various SOLUTIONS to reverse the path of global decline.

Normal Is Over is a compelling and visually rich film directed by award-winning and investigative journalist Renée

Her film chronicles the way humans have inadvertently imperiled our planet: species extinction, climate change, the depletion of critical natural resources, and industrial control of our food production.
This unique documentary examines how our economic and financial system connects these issues, and offers SOLUTIONS, which could be implemented immediately; from practical everyday fixes to rethinking the overarching myths of our time.

With an open mind Renée investigates the cause, and symptoms of our crisis while offering hope. She meets experts, and pioneers all over the world, trying to stave off global decline. They concentrate on matters such as ecological economics, organic agriculture, renewable energy, saving species, reducing our carbon footprints, and sustainable finance.

The film mixes accurate, relevant content with humor, and suggests ways how we can take positive practical action and change our lifestyles for future generations.

]]>http://kindredmedia.org/2017/07/normal-new-documentary-film/feed/0Charles Eisenstein Appears On Oprahhttp://kindredmedia.org/2017/07/charles-eisenstein-appears-oprah-age-need/
http://kindredmedia.org/2017/07/charles-eisenstein-appears-oprah-age-need/#respondSun, 16 Jul 2017 23:18:36 +0000http://kindredmedia.org/?p=20465“The people who have the opportunity to alter the field, and to create an open world for the future, are the parents. Those are the most powerful beings on Earth right now.” Oprah says to Charles at the 1:53 mark. Charles and Oprah sit down and discuss the themes of civilization, human cultural evolution, how […]

“The people who have the opportunity to alter the field, and to create an open world for the future, are the parents. Those are the most powerful beings on Earth right now.” Oprah says to Charles at the 1:53 mark.

Charles and Oprah sit down and discuss the themes of civilization, human cultural evolution, how change really happens in the world, and the importance of interbeing on OWN’ Super Soul Sunday on July 16, 2017.

Interview Transcript

Oprah Intro: Today, on Super Soul Sunday, author, scholar and speaker Charles Eisenstein. With a unique perspective on our culture, Charles has become known for his challenging and thought-provoking online essays. He urges readers to re-think the fury and indignation erupting between so many Americans.

C: Everything that’s happening to the world is happening to us and whether or not we believe it, we can still FEEL it.

O: And understand that what lies beneath the rage is actually a painful longing for reunion.

C: Martin Luther King basically said that. You can use hatred as a weapon but you cannot use hatred to defeat hate.

O: Absolutely

—————-

O: So the reason I start with this is because everywhere you go, every conversation you’re in, people are talking about this, but they’re not able to articulate what it is. So we’re looking at our current political climate. We’re looking at living under a barrage of daily reminders, really, of how angry, how divided this country has become. It feels like we’re experiencing right now, a really teachable moment. In that, what I believe is that if we’re not able to shift to some form of empathy and compassion, that we’re going to move into a level of lessons that we really aren’t prepared to learn right now.

So, do you believe our nation has been broken open?

C: Not yet. But it’s coming. I would love to see our nation broken open. Sometimes, we say that about a person like; ‘oh that experience just broke him open, broke him wide open,’ and now he begins to sob, now the grief comes in, now he changes his view of life. That hasn’t quite happened yet. We’re still holding on to the old story, the old ‘normal.’

And part of that is what you were just talking about. The polarized oppositional, hate-based politics which is basically two sides holding on tighter and tighter and tighter to their polarized opinions about each other and their superficial diagnosis that the cause of the problem is those ‘bad’ people.

O: Yeah, it’s THOSE people and then those people say it’s THOSE people and then everybody is shouting each other down. I love the article that you wrote two days after the election this year, it was called ‘Hate, Grief and the New Story.’ And you wrote that because…

C: Because I was alarmed and really saddened at the level of hatred and just the reiteration of war mentality…

O: On both sides

C: On both sides, yeah. I mean, each side thinks that it’s the other side who is the ‘bad’ guys. And what I’m seeing is this pattern. This is I guess, part of the mythology of our culture, it’s a formula for making the world a better place. And the formula says, first find the ‘bad’ guy, blame something and then go to war against that. Control that thing.

O: That’s the basis of story-telling. You know, you gotta have the antagonist, you gotta have the thing that you’re fighting against. You gotta find the hero that you’re following, you know?

C: Right, yup. Same pattern in almost every action movie. And what’s missing here is the deeper matrix of causes, that is much more complicated. So two things happen when you realize the real causes.

One is that you don’t know what to do. Because the usual solution of finding the ‘bad’ guy and fighting the bad guy doesn’t work. So you don’t know what to do. I would love to see some politicians run for office and say, ‘Health care, immigration, I have no idea what to do.’ Like, wouldn’t that be refreshing, if someone just said, ‘I don’t know what to do’ instead of having to have a plan which is going to be a reiteration of policies based ultimately on this war thinking that don’t work.

And the second thing that happens, is that you realize that I’m part of the problem too, or we’re part of the problem too. It’s not just some other person.

O: I don’t think people realize they’re part of the problem. That’s why I’m sitting here talking to you today. Because I think that what you’re doing with your essays is trying to get us to see that we ARE part of the problem. Seeing our role in the problem because I think we’re still in that, ‘It’s THAT guy, he’s the one, if only they just straighten their stuff out (C: right) if they come to their senses, or if they weren’t ‘deplorables;’ whatever word they want to use to try to put the other side, the other people who don’t think the way they do, down.

So what you’re ultimately saying in the essay on ‘Hate, and Grief and creating the New Story’ is we’ve gotta stop the hating.

C: Because it’s a delusion. It’s based on judgments that aren’t true. Like if I say, (and this happens in personal life too) that you’re doing that because you’re not quite as good a person as me. Because if I were you, in the totality of your circumstances, I’d be better than that. If I were poor, rural white, I wouldn’t be a racist, I wouldn’t say such a thing, whatever the story is. Because in fact, if you were that person, in the totality of their circumstances, you’d do that too. And any judgment that says I’m different from you…

O: I’m better than you…

C: that means that there’s a deficit of understanding and this is what I would call the ‘new story’ or the ‘next story’ of Interbeing that says that in some sense we’re all one. If I were in your situation, then I would do as you do, and if I think otherwise it means I don’t understand your situation.

O: So the important thing, the question I thought was so vital that you brought out in your essay on ‘hate and grief and our new story’ is: What’s it like to be you?

C: Yeah

O: Which is fascinating to me because as I’ve sat in this chair in various forms, in various chairs throughout my career, that is really what I’m seeking to find when I sit down with a person, is ‘what’s it like to be you?’ And you’re saying we each need to ask that question of ‘the other’ and ask it not in a rhetorical sense but really from a point of view of what IS that like to be you?

C: Yeah, otherwise we’re going to be trapped in the old drama of fighting the enemy. So, like for example we’re never going to…

O: And we’re going to lose, we’re going to lose that fight

C: Even if we win the battle we’ll lose the war. Like you might be able to win the battle, say politically by arousing so much anger, indignation and hatred against the other side that you overcome them in the next election but what you will have done is strengthen the ground conditions of hatred. Martin Luther King basically said that. You can use hatred as a weapon but you cannot use hatred to defeat hate.

O: Absolutely

(Promo for next segment: O: Was it you that once said that hate is a bodyguard for grief?)

O: So you wrote an essay as we’ve been talking about, after the presidential election asking readers to stop feeding the hate that stems from thinking that they are better than anyone else because you believe that all people are suffering from actually the same wound. So what do you think is the world’s greatest wound?

C: I call it the wound of separation. That it’s the felt experience of being cut off from all that we’re meant to intimately connect to and then from that place feeding the hate. You know, online comments putting someone else down, it kind of almost feels good to make jokes at the expense of someone else but does it REALLY feel good?

O: I think it feels good in that moment for people. I think there are people who feel really good when they can get off on a line on social media and they think they actually hurt somebody. But I think this reality-based culture do whatever is necessary, say whatever you need, you come out the victor no matter what, at any expense, I think it’s trained us to believe that being snarky is fulfilling.

C: I think maybe that the good feeling seems to me like it’s similar to the feeling of getting a hit or fix but you feel good for a little bit but it doesn’t assuage the underlying pain, the underlying grief, you know…

O: And you’re saying all sides are feeling this underlying grief and that it’s not political even though people might have used their power to vote and acted politically but the feelings that people have, this feeling of separation, of not being valued, of not being important, of not mattering in the world is pervasive on both sides. That’s what you’re saying.

C: That’s the water in which we swim.

O: As someone who studies human cultural evolution you suggested that profound change happens only through collapse and right now for millions of people the idea of what’s normal has come unhinged, as you say in your essay, how so?

C: Well, we had a formula for how to do life, you study hard and get good grades, and you’ll go to a good school and get a good job. You get married, you have…

O: You drive a certain kind of car and you have a certain amount of square footage

C: And you get sick you go to the doctor, the doctor fixes you and you participate in this grand project of civilization. And you’ll be ok. That story on every level has been disintegrating; it’s not working anymore.

We don’t have the technological utopia that was promised to us, back in the ‘50s and ‘60s, you know, when we had these visions of the future with an age of leisure with robot servants, space colonies, the cure of all diseases. It looked like we were going to do that, as one disease after another was conquered. But since then, we’ve had all these new diseases arise, auto-immune diseases, that, we have no idea how to solve, no idea how to cure.

And in politics too, like the story of American democracy is supposed to work, or the deeper narrative of ‘America, land of the free, home of the brave’ bringing peace and democracy to the world. All of these are getting harder and harder to maintain.

One thing that happens before it really breaks down, is that you hold on even tighter to the story that’s not working. And that might be part of what’s happening politically today and at some point, you just can’t hold on anymore.

O: So was it you who once said that hate is a bodyguard for grief?

C: Yeah, right, so something really hurts and that hurt is channeled through a story of blame and it becomes hatred. But if you channel it through a different story or not through any story at all and you just feel it, then it doesn’t become hatred.

(Promo for next segment: O: You write that “when the conscious mind cannot find a reason to say no, the unconscious says no in its own way.” What do you mean by that?)

O: Charles Eisenstein is the author of four books including his most recent, ‘The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know is Possible.’ I love that book title. His premise is that no matter how disconnected we all are feeling, every person we encounter, every experience we have, positive or negative, mirrors something inside ourselves in all forms, social media posts, news headlines, even something as simple as a conversation. Charles believes your individual being partakes of all beings in every moment you encounter.

O: So what do you mean by we’re just not separate individuals?

C: Well, we kind of live in a mythology and by mythology I mean the story that answers basic questions, like, ‘Who are you?’ ‘What’s the purpose of life?’ ‘What’s real?’ ‘How do you create change in the world?’ ‘What’s the purpose of humanity?’ These are really basic questions that every culture asks.

O: Yeah, I actually ask them on this show.

C: Well yeah, so we’ve had a cultural story that answers those questions and basically it comes down to who you are is a separate individual in a world that is separate from you, an objective universe and this universe is populated by other separate individuals who since they’re separate from you, you’re basically in competition with them. Their well-being doesn’t mean that you’re going to be better off, in fact, their well-being could mean more for them and less for you. So we’re in this constant competition, surrounded by impersonal forces. So this story, I call it the story of separation. So on the human level, the same story says that human progress and our destiny comes through the conquest of nature…

O: And other beings that we see as separate from ourselves

C: Right so health comes through conquering bacteria or conquering nature, even your own nature. Like health, virtue, wealth, etc. comes through discipline through exercising control over yourself over your desires perhaps. So, it’s the same pattern on an individual level, on an economic level, on a political level and also on an ecological level, the human relationship to the world. So that’s kind of the big picture. Because these are the myths that condition us to see the world.

O: So what you’re saying is, this is the way we have been operating up until now and that we are actually in the midst of creating a new story but most people are not conscious of the fact that we’re creating the new story and that’s why we’re in so much confusion right now. Because the new story is evolving and a lot of people aren’t aware that the new story is evolving.

C: Yeah, because we’re surrounded by the institutions of the old story. We still live in communities that aren’t really communities because we don’t know the people around us, we’re surrounded by strangers…

O: or we actually know more about who’s on the cover of People Magazine or we know more about the lives of people you don’t know and will never meet, than you do your next door neighbor.

C: Right, so we feel lonely. Like if we’re not actually our separate selves then our beingness, our sense of being in the world, depends on our relationships. And when our intimate relationships are only in the family, I’m not talking about sexual intimacy, I’m talking about really being known: when we don’t know our neighbors and we’re not participating in the natural world, in an intimate way, then we feel alone. We don’t even know who we are. There’s a deficit of identity when we’re shrunk down into these little separate selves.

O: And it’s interesting because you have been feeling this; I think you call it in ‘The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know is Possible,’ (what a beautiful name for a book, actually) you call it the sense of wrongness, that something is wrong, you feel that there’s a wrongness going on and you’ve been feeling this your entire life, even as a little boy.

C: Yeah, just like that feeling of just sitting in school and it’s a beautiful day outside and there’s some part of you that knows, it’s not supposed to be this way, I’m not supposed to be filling out these worksheets. I had a politically radical father who introduced me quite early to a bit of the true history of our nation, the genocide underneath its slavery, economic oppression, part of me was like, it’s not supposed to be this way. But so much of the conditioning, the programming around me said that, no your supposed to be happy here with the life that’s offered to you…

O: Because everybody around you is telling you that, yeah, go ahead…

C: Yeah, authority figures are telling you that, you get an A if you do well on those worksheets and if you walk outside, you get in trouble and you get sent to the Principal’s office, just that simple. So that knowledge I think, for many people is a lonely knowledge; this knowledge that life is supposed to be more authentic, more intimate, more real and this kind of low-level suffering that we take for granted, or for many people, HIGH level suffering that we take for granted, it doesn’t have to be like this.

O: And this low-level suffering, another word for suffering you use is separation, this feeling that you’re disconnected, even though you are in a room or in a world where you are engaging with people all the time, but there’s this low-level sense of disconnection from communities which is what you’re talking about.

I love what you say as early as page 2 here, you say:

“On some level, we all know better. This knowledge seldom finds clear articulation, so instead we express it indirectly through covert and overt rebellion.” (I find that so interesting.) “Addiction, self-sabotage, procrastination, laziness, rage, chronic fatigue, and depression are all ways that we withhold our full participation in the program of life that we are offered.”

Well said sir.

C: Thank you.

O: And you write that “When the conscious mind cannot find a reason to say no, the unconscious says no in its own way.” What do you mean by that?

C: Like you might have every mental reason to try really hard to ‘make it,’ to be a success, to get good grades, to get a good job, to play the game of life as its been offered to us, but there’s a rebellion, I think, it’s a mutiny of the soul, I call it, that says ‘yeah, you can make me sit down in this seat but you can’t make me pay attention.’

O: Right

(Promo for next segment: O: So explain why you think creating a movement isn’t always a good idea. Because I hear everybody saying ‘we need a movement. we need a movement.’

And…

How do we begin to shift from what you call a culture of judgment to a culture of empathy? How do we do that?)

O: Explain why you think creating a movement isn’t always a good idea. Because I hear everybody saying ‘we need a movement. we need a movement.’

C: Yeah, how do you create a movement? People say that, but real movements seem to start unintentionally. And I think it’s more true that movements create us. Someone goes out and plants a garden or builds a little house for a homeless person or does something like that, other people then say, ‘Yeah, that’s a good idea, I think I’ll do that!’ And it becomes a movement.

O: And these little, small acts are like acts of prayer, don’t you think? When you do a small, kind thing.

C: You don’t know how it’s going to affect the world, but by doing it, you’re making a statement of what kind of world I want to live in. And I think it’s a real mistake to condition these things on, ‘OK, let’s make sure it can go viral. Let’s make sure it can scale up.’ Because most things will never scale up in any predictable way. And I think the most important things that people are doing in this world are those that are invisible, even thankless.

People like me and to a greater extent you, have a gigantic platform or even take it up a notch, the President or something, we think that these are the people with the power in the world, cause you can make a big wave but how do you change the deep currents? And I have this intuitive feeling that the people who are really altering the future of 500 years, might be the grandmothers who are taking precious time one-on-one with a child, a sick child, or the kindergarten teachers…

O: I was definitely going to say the parents, the people who have the opportunity to alter the field, and to create an open field for the world for the future are the parents, those are actually the most powerful beings on earth right now, I think.

C: Yeah, anybody whose doing something out of love.

O: You say, “The fundamental precept of the new story is that we are in-separate from the universe and our being partakes in the being of everyone and everything else. Why should we believe this? Let’s start with the obvious. This Interbeing is something we can feel. Why does it hurt when we hear of another person coming to harm? Why when we read of mass die-offs of the coral reefs and see their bleached skeletons do we feel like we’ve sustained a blow? Because it’s literally happening to ourselves, our extended selves.”

O: So this is the new story we need to acknowledge and become conscious of, in order to step into what is the next evolved stage for us. Is that what you’re saying?

C: Yeah, and that it’s already happening to us. This expansion of consciousness, because the shields, the barriers, that we’re maintaining to NOT FEEL, we can’t hold those up anymore. Reality is breaking through. Part of the political, economic, environmental crisis is that breakthrough. It’s an initiation for our society, for humanity.

O: Do you think it will be our lifetimes when we accept the new story? I’m older than you so I don’t think it’s going to be in mine so, and I don’t know if it’s going to be in yours…

C: It’s going to, it will actually I can say that I accept the new story but as far as how I actually live, how I actually speak, how I actually relate, maybe I’ve got it maybe like 1%. But I like to think that by the end of my lifetime, I’ll be able to say, we’ve turned the corner. We’ve turned the corner. Things might be even worse, in some material measurable ways, but we kind of get it now.

O: That we’re all connected?

C: Yeah, if you’re not a separate self. Then what are you? You’re maybe the mirror of all things or you are the totality of your relationships. So that means, that anything that happens, to anything, to any being is happening to you on some level. It means that any difficult relationship you have is mirroring something in yourself. It means that everything you do to the world will somehow come back to you. It means that the world outside ourselves is not just a bunch of stuff; but it’s a mirror of self. It has qualities like consciousness and intelligence that aren’t just in human beings, but they’re in all things, that pond over there, this tree…

O: It’s why you can see a video like I saw the other day of a pelican wrapped in plastic, trapped in plastic, and I started to tear up because there’s a part of me that is so connected to that pelican, it felt like that thing was happening to me.

C: It’s happening to you, yeah. Everything that’s happening to the world is happening to us. And whether or not we believe it, we can still FEEL it. That’s why it hurts so much and we don’t even know why.

O: Yes. And the reason why we are so separated and feel so isolated and lonely in this separation is because we’ve numbed ourselves to the feeling that we are all connected.

Everything is geared to pull you away from the idea; [so] that you are not connected that you are separate.

C: So the story basically says that if we can only insulate ourselves effectively enough, build a high enough wall, a good enough surveillance system, strong enough prisons, then we can keep the suffering out. But it’s not true and we’re learning that the hard way, that if we destroy the ecosystems, then our own health is going to deteriorate. It’s inescapable, we’re all connected; that’s what we’re learning through a kind of cultural initiation.

O: The only people that seem to get it right are children.

C: Yeah, we’re all born knowing, that we live in a magical world, that we’re all connected, yeah, it’s an innate knowledge.

O: The children get it and at some point it’s sort of drained from them…

C: That’s part of it, yeah.

O: OK what are some of the principles of Interbeing? I remember having a conversation with Thich Nhat Hanh who also talks about this a lot.

C: I think he might have actually coined the term, Interbeing, but it’s a really natural word to use because it’s not just interdependency or interconnection; it’s that my very existence depends on the existence of all beings. So if a species goes extinct, something dies in me. I become poorer.

O: How then do we start to shift, I mean, I hope everybody does to your website and reads the essay that you did on ‘Hate, Grief and a New Story’ we need to tell ourselves but how do we begin to shift from what you call a culture of judgment to a culture of empathy? How do we do that?

C: For me, the basic practice is to ask, ‘what is it like to be you?’ Especially if I’m in judgment. Because if I’m in judgment, that means my understanding is deficient. Judgment meaning, if I were you I’d do differently, I’d do better. So if you ask ‘well, what is it like to be racist and how does someone become a racist? It doesn’t mean that you’re ‘giving them a free pass,’ it means that you actually care…

O: Or that you’re normalizing racism

C: It’s that you actually care about healing racism. So you want to REALLY understand it and not just get the ego gratification of saying you’re wrong, I’m right, I’m good. Like you demonstrate you’re ‘good’ by being on the side of good in the war on evil. We’ve had the war on evil now for several thousand years, has it worked?

O: How’s that working for ya? Eh?

C: Yeah, right. Time to try something else. Yeah.

(Promo for next segment: O: You believe that A More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know is Possible is less than 60 seconds away. So how can people find intimacy, connection within one minute of searching?)

O: You believe that A More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know is Possible (love the title) is closer than close, less than 60 seconds away. So how can people find intimacy, connection within one minute of searching? You talk about it here.

C: Probably most people have had those experiences, it might be at the bedside of a dying person or having a deep spiritual experience where you’re like ‘Oh! It’s all here already’ and everything is a miracle! We have these experiences. I think what I was referencing, what you were reading is the experience of gazing into someone’s eyes, you know, and you see ‘oh, you’re the same being I am’ gazing out of a different set of eyes and you can have a really deep experience that way.

O: Yeah, when I read that I thought, you are so right. We go through life and we don’t even allow ourselves the experience of gazing into a person’s eyes. I started thinking about that. How long do I actually look into a person’s eyes, it’s almost in our culture considered invasive, you’re not supposed to continue looking into someone’s eyes. You don’t look at a person’s eyes long enough to realize ‘Oh, I’m in there and you’re in here.’ It’s kind of like, ‘how you doin’? Keep moving.

C: Because if we did that, I think the whole apparatus of our society would stop working. Like it’s uncomfortable for a reason. It’s uncomfortable because the world that is so familiar cannot accommodate that amount of connection and intimacy; it’s actually kind of a threat. It says that the level of joy and intimacy that you’ve settled for, is a lot less than what’s possible. We’re being short-changed. And deep experiences like that are in a way, kind of threatening and sometimes people have an experience; could be a heart attack or something that really brings them into touch with what is real.

O: Usually it’s when something has gone wrong when people take the time to actually look in the eyes of a loved one and really see them. Yeah, that is a really interesting point you brought up. And so, just taking the time to look into somebody’s eyes for sixty-seconds changes the vibration, the energy between the two of you regardless, doesn’t it?

C: Yup, and it kind of reconfigures what normal is. When you have an experience like that, like a lot of people if they have a near-death experience or a powerful transformational religious experience, they go back to their normal lives but those lives no longer seem so normal. And reality as they’ve known it, no longer seems so real. And so the hold of the old story is loosened.

O: What can help change this ‘us’ versus ‘them’ mentality into realizing that we’re all in this thing together? What we’re talking about here, looking at each other in the eye and what else?

C: I think anything that re-humanizes other people. Sometimes people do processes where they bring people on opposite sides of a conflict together into a room and create conditions where they can connect with each other’s humanity and the conflicts become, not irrelevant, but they’re put in a different light. Because when you see your enemy’s humanity, then the operating assumption that had powered the conflict may change.

O: And what do you envision as our new story? You’ve seen glimpses of new ideas that give you hope. Can you share some?

C: Pretty much anything that is called ‘alternative’ or ‘holistic’ is basically anything that says that ‘yeah, we’re connected. We’re interdependent. Your well-being will bring my well-being. More for you is more for me. It’s the mentality of the gift, of generosity. What I give to the world will come back to me somehow. Because we’re not really separate. Other cultures had this. Ancient cultures, indigenous cultures. In those cultures, your well-being, your wealth, your status, depended on how generous you were. So you could give everything away and you’d know you’d be OK because people would take care of you too. So you were at ease. You felt at home in the world and you saw this in nature as well. You saw every being not trying to out-compete all the others but every being offering a gift toward the health and evolution of all things.

34:44 O: So this is from page 7 of your book, you say:

“I’m not an avatar or a saint, I’m an ordinary man. And if my words fulfill their intention which is to catalyze a next step, big or small, into the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible, my very ordinariness becomes highly significant. It shows how close we all are, all of us ordinary humans to a profound transformation of consciousness and being. If I, an ordinary man can see it, we must be almost there.”

C: Yeah. We’re all really really close, we’re already there in a new consciousness. So, we need to help each other. You know, you have this breakthrough, yes, I’m going to devote my life to this thing I love, but then the voices from inside and outside say, well that’s just irresponsible. That’s impractical.

O: You can’t be that way

C: Yeah, don’t be naîve. But we need people to say, you’ve gotta trust that.

O: Your inner knowing, your inner being.

C: Yeah.

O: Well, thank you for reminding us of The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible. Thanks Charles.

]]>http://kindredmedia.org/2017/07/charles-eisenstein-appears-oprah-age-need/feed/0Parenting For A Peaceful World Inspires New Songhttp://kindredmedia.org/2017/07/parenting-peaceful-world-inspires-new-song/
http://kindredmedia.org/2017/07/parenting-peaceful-world-inspires-new-song/#respondFri, 14 Jul 2017 00:58:51 +0000http://kindredmedia.org/?p=20474I was very touched to receive a message from Tracey Curtis, English singer-songwriter and mother-of-five who wrote a song called: ‘Raising Girls and Boys’ inspired by my book Parenting for a Peaceful World. She writes songs about family, life and death, protest songs and is blessed with a uniquely cheeky, clear and sweet voice. And she’s not […]

I was very touched to receive a message from Tracey Curtis, English singer-songwriter and mother-of-five who wrote a song called: ‘Raising Girls and Boys’ inspired by my book Parenting for a Peaceful World.

Discover the psycho-social-emotional history of parenting in Robin’s seminal book.

She writes songs about family, life and death, protest songs and is blessed with a uniquely cheeky, clear and sweet voice. And she’s not afraid to aim her guitar at institutions that deserve it.

If the message of my book became music, I can’t be happier. Thank you Tracey. You can hear Tracey’s song, ‘Raising Girls and Boys’ above and here more of her work at her website here.

]]>http://kindredmedia.org/2017/07/parenting-peaceful-world-inspires-new-song/feed/0The Age Of We Need Each Otherhttp://kindredmedia.org/2017/07/the-age-of-we-need-each-other/
http://kindredmedia.org/2017/07/the-age-of-we-need-each-other/#respondWed, 05 Jul 2017 17:54:19 +0000http://kindredmedia.org/?p=20491“The people who have the opportunity to alter the field, and to create an open world for the future, are the parents. Those are the most powerful beings on Earth right now.” Oprah says to Charles at the 1:53 mark. The Age Of We Need Each Other – Reflections On Appearing On Oprah Fifteen years […]

“The people who have the opportunity to alter the field, and to create an open world for the future, are the parents. Those are the most powerful beings on Earth right now.” Oprah says to Charles at the 1:53 mark.

The Age Of We Need Each Other – Reflections On Appearing On Oprah

Fifteen years ago when I began writing books, I had high hopes that someday I would be “discovered” and that “my message” would thereby reach millions of people and change the world for the better.

That ambition began to disintegrate soon after, when after years of labor The Ascent of Humanity found no takers in the publishing world. So I self-published, still hoping that word-of-mouth would propel it to best-seller status. That would show all those publishers! I remember looking at the sales numbers in August 2007 – its fifth month, about the time it should have been gaining momentum. Total sales that month: five copies. Around the same time I was evicted from my apartment (having pinned all my hopes and income on the book) and spent the next half year living temporarily in other people’s houses, children in tow.

It was a painful yet beautiful clarifying experience that asked me, “Why are you doing this work? Is it because you hope to become a celebrated intellectual? Or do you really care about serving the healing of the world?” The experience of failure revealed my secret hopes and motivations.

I had to admit there was some of both motivations, self and service. OK, well, a lot of both. I realized I had to let go of the first motive, or it would occlude the second. Around that time I had a vision of a spiritual being that came to me and said, “Charles, is it really your wish that the work you do fulfill its potential and exercise its right role in the evolution of all things?”

“Yes,” I said, “that is my wish.”

“OK then,” said the being. “I can make that happen, but you will have to pay a price. The price is that you will never be recognized for your role. The story you are speaking will change the world, but you will never get credit for it. You will never get wealth, fame, or prestige. Do you agree to pay that price?”

I tried to worm my way out of it, but the being was unyielding. If it was going to be either-or, how could I live with myself knowing in my heart of hearts I’d betrayed my purpose? So I consented to its offer.

Of course, time would tell that it wasn’t actually either-or. What was important in that clarifying moment was that I declare my ultimate loyalty. Once that happened, recognition and prestige might or might not come as a byproduct, but it wouldn’t be the goal. After all, the work I do isn’t “my” work. These are ideas whose time has come and they need capable scribes. Our true wages in life consist of the satisfaction we get from a job well done. Aside from that, well, the rain falls on the just and unjust alike.

That was part one of the disintegration of my ambition. The first part was the disintegration of personal ambition. The second part was the disintegration of the ambition to do big things to change the world. I began to understand that our concepts of big impact versus small impact are part of what needs to be healed. Our culture validates and celebrates those who are out there with big platforms speaking to millions of people, while ignoring those who do humble, quiet work, taking care of just one sick person, one child, or one small place on this earth.

When I meet one of these people, I know that their impact doesn’t depend on their kind action going viral on the internet and reaching millions of people. Even if no one ever knows and no one ever thanks them for taking in that old woman with dementia and sacrificing a normal life to care for her, that choice sends ripples outward through the fabric of causality. On a five hundred or five thousand year timescale, the impact is no smaller than anything a President does.

Certain choices feel significant to us, unreasonably. The heart calls us to actions that the mind cannot justify in the face of global problems. The logic of bigness can drag us into feelings of irrelevance, leading us to project importance onto the people we see on our screens. But knowing how much harm has been done by those very people in the name of bettering the world, I became wary of playing that game.

The calculating mind thinks that just helping one person has a smaller impact on the world than helping a thousand. It wants to scale up, to get big. That is not necessary in a different causal logic, the logic that knows, “God sees everything,” or the logic of Morphic Resonance that knows that any change that happens in one place creates a field that allows the same kind of change to happen elsewhere. Acts of kindness strengthen the field of kindness, acts of love strengthen the field of love, acts of hate strengthen the field of hate.

Nor is scaling up necessary when we trust that the tasks life sets before us are part of a larger tapestry, woven by an intelligence that puts us in exactly the right place at the right time.

I attended a funeral recently for a central Pennsylvania farmer, Roy Brubaker, among several hundred mourners. One of the testimonials came from a young farmer who said something like this: “Roy is the one who taught me what success really is. Success is having the capacity to always be there for your neighbors. Any time someone called with a problem, Roy would put down what he was doing and be right over to help.”

This farmer had been Roy’s intern. When he went into business for himself and became Roy’s competitor, Roy helped him along with advice and material aid, and even announced his new competitor’s farm share program to his own mailing list. At the end of his speech, the young farmer said, “I used to think Roy was able to help so many people because he was a successful farmer who had it made. But now I think he was probably more like me, with fifty vegetable crops all crying for attention and a million things to do. He was there for people anyway.”

Roy didn’t wait until he had it made to start being generous.

This is the kind of person that holds the world together. On a practical level, they are the reason society hangs together despite its pervasive injustice, poverty, trauma, and so on. They also anchor the field of love that helps the rest of us serve our purpose rather than our personal ambition.

Parenting In The Space Between Stories, An Interview With Charles Eisenstein – Download Podcast and Read Transcript

As I run into more such people and hear their stories, I realize that I don’t need to worry about the size of my audience or about reaching “people of influence.” My job is just to do my work with as much love and sincerity as I can. I can trust that the right people will read it. I am awed and humbled by people like Roy whom I meet in my travels and in my community. They live in service, in love, with great faith and courage, and unlike me they don’t have thousands of people telling them how important their work is. In fact, quite often the system and culture we live in discourages them, telling them that they are foolish, naïve, irresponsible, impractical, and giving them little financial reward. How many times have you been told a life dedicated to beauty or nurture or healing is unrealistic? Maybe after everything on your farm is all ship-shape, maybe after you are personally secure with a solid career and secure investments, maybe then you can afford a little generosity. So I admire people who are generous first, generous with their precious lives. They are my teachers. They are the ones who have eroded my ambition to make it big – even with the excuse of serving the cause.

I am reminded of a Zen teaching story in which the Zen master is approached by a messenger from the emperor. “The emperor has heard of your teaching and wants you to come to court to be the official imperial teacher.”

The Zen master declined the invitation.

A year later the invitation was repeated. This time the master agreed to come. When asked why, he said, “When I first got the invitation, I knew I wasn’t ready because I felt the stirring of excitement. I thought this would be a great chance to spread the Dharma throughout the realm. Then I realized that this ambition, which sees one student as more important than another, disqualified me from being his teacher. I had to wait until I could see the emperor as I would any other person.”

Thanks to the humble people who hold the world together, I am learning no longer to favor the emperor over any other person. What guides me is a certain feeling of resonance, curiosity, or rightness.

Ironically, having lost my careerist ambitions, this year Oprah Winfrey invited me to tape an interview with her for (even more ironically) the show Super Soul Sunday. Five years ago my heart would have been thumping with excitement at the prospect of making it big, but now the feeling was one of curiosity and adventure. From the God’s-eye perspective, was that hour to be more important than the hour I spent with a friend in need? Or the hour you spent taking a stranger to the emergency room?

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I think the conversation with Oprah is a marker of changing times. I was amazed that someone in her position would even take notice of my writing, since it lies quite outside any familiar discourse within the mainstream. (At least I’ve never seen anything in mainstream media remotely similar to my election article that attracted her attention.) Our meeting is perhaps a sign that our country’s familiar, polarized social discourse is broken, and that her people – the vast and fairly mainstream audience she serves – are willing to look outside it.Yet my response was an immediate yes, accompanied by feelings of wonderment that my world was intersecting with hers. You see, Oprah occupies nearly a different universe from my own countercultural fringe. Could it be, I think with leaping heart, that the gulf between our worlds is narrowing? That the ideas I serve and the consciousness I speak to are ready to penetrate the mainstream?

By this I do not mean to diminish her extraordinary personal qualities. I experienced her as astute, perceptive, sincere, expansive, and even humble, a master of her art. But I think her reaching out reflects more than these personal qualities.

I sometimes see myself as a kind of receiving antenna for information that a certain segment of humanity is asking for. A use has been found for the weird kid in high school! On a much larger scale, Oprah is something akin to that as well: not just herself, she is an avatar of the collective mind. Deeply attuned to her audience, when she brings something into their view it is probably because she knows they are ready to see it.

During our conversation I sometimes had the feeling that she personally would have liked to geek out and dive much deeper, but that she disciplined herself to remain the antenna of her audience and stay within the format of the program, which doesn’t lend itself to my usual long disquisitions. I meanwhile was trying to frame ideas for a mainstream audience that I expect isn’t familiar with some of my basic operating concepts. Our conversation felt a bit awkward at times, groping for a structure, as if we were trying to furnish a very large house with a motley mix of beautiful but odd furniture. Nonetheless I think we created a habitable enough corner to welcome people into a new perspective.

In the years since my encounter with the spiritual being, I’ve become comfortable in the cultural fringes where my work has found its home. I have scaled back on traveling and speaking in order to spend more time with my precious loved ones and to connect with the source of knowledge in nature, silence, and intimate connections. I’m with my family at my brother’s farm right now, doing farm labor part of the day and writing during the other part. The flurry of publicity that might follow the Oprah appearance (or might not – it could just be a blip on the radar) poses me with another question, the complement of the one my initial “failure” posed. If it serves the work, am I willing to sacrifice the reclusiveness I am coming to love? If it serves, am I willing to be on other programs where the host may not be as gracious as Oprah? Am I willing to be more of a public figure and deal with the attendant projections, positive and negative? Do I have the strength to remember who the real super souls are – the Roy Brubakers, the dolphin rescuers, the hospice workers, the care givers, the peace witnesses, the unpaid healers, the humble grandfathers taking a child berry-picking, the single moms struggling to hold it all together not imagining that their monumental efforts at patience have an impact on the whole world?

Let me be honest with you: if I hadn’t been facing the total collapse of my success fantasies already, I probably wouldn’t have accepted the spiritual being’s offer. And by the way, it is an offer that is constantly renewed. Every day we are asked, “What will you serve?” I had not the strength on my own to say yes to a life of service. Nor do I now, save for the help I receive from others who hold the field, the people who humble me every day with their generosity, sincerity, and selflessness. To the extent I am effective at what I do, it is because of you.

If I am right that my Oprah appearance is a marker (however small) of the unraveling of once-dominant worldviews, then it only happened because the emerging worldview I speak for is being held so strongly now by so many. Take it then as an encouraging sign. Whether or not it proves to be a breakthrough moment for the concepts of empathy and interbeing we discussed, it suggests that they are coming closer toward consensus reality. We will not be alone here much longer. I thank all who have held the field of knowledge I speak from, who believe my words even more than I do myself, and who therefore uphold me in the work that upholds you. That is how we transition from the Age of Separation to the age of We Need Each Other.

]]>http://kindredmedia.org/2017/07/the-age-of-we-need-each-other/feed/0My Grandma Is Not A Hippiehttp://kindredmedia.org/2017/06/grandma-not-hippie/
http://kindredmedia.org/2017/06/grandma-not-hippie/#respondFri, 09 Jun 2017 01:07:08 +0000http://kindredmedia.org/?p=20303Caption: My grandmother, Ida Stone, on a family vacation in Myrtle Beach, SC; at my wedding in 1988; on another family vacation with her husband and children; on her high school graduation day; with my son; and the log house she was born in on June 8, 1918. An Early Imprint Becomes A Mother (of […]

]]>Caption: My grandmother, Ida Stone, on a family vacation in Myrtle Beach, SC; at my wedding in 1988; on another family vacation with her husband and children; on her high school graduation day; with my son; and the log house she was born in on June 8, 1918.

An Early Imprint Becomes A Mother (of a) Quest

Today is my paternal grandmother’s 99th birthday. On June 8, 1918, Ida Dorothy Hodges was born in a log house (not cabin, or she will correct you) in a hollow at the bottom of a small mountain in Surry County, North Carolina. Except for a few summers, she lived in this well-loved family home until she married my grandfather, Walter Cecil Stone, at twenty. I’ve heard whispered accounts at family gatherings of how she inserted the number 21 into her shoe so as not to be telling a lie when asked if she was “over 21” at the across-the-state-line wedding ceremony in Virginia… but we’re not supposed to know this story, so just forget I mentioned it.

In the conscious parenting world, and now prenatal neuroscience, we talk of early imprints, often meaning Adverse Childhood Events (ACEs) that leave negative and draining neurological damage, making us vulnerable to modern stresses, resulting in mental and chronic illnesses. But there are other imprints, positive and nourishing imprints we receive as well from those who impact our young lives, from our direct biological parents, caregivers, relatives and even our ancestors (see Mark Wolynn’s book, It Didn’t Start With You).

I credit my nearly 20-year Mother (of a) Quest for all things holistic and sustainable to the early imprint of pilgrimages to my grandmother’s home. During high holy days, like Christmas and Easter, my father would scoop my brother and I out of our beds at four a.m. and tuck us into the roomy back seat of our Ford Fairlane with pillows and blankets, sometimes never waking us up before setting out on the seven or eight-hour journey from the coast of Virginia to the foothills of North Carolina.

When my brother and I arrived, we were surrounded by rolling farm land and an extended family who ate together, sang together, and shared our stories together, especially those about our pioneering ancestors listed in reverently held books like The Stones of Surry, or teasing tales like when my father’s childhood mule, Brownie, would run away from him, tour the hillside, and come back after chores but in time for dinner.

Over time, this childhood imprint transformed into an amalgam, a composite memory of the meaning of “family” – sacred, holy, connected, joyful – and left an expectation in my cells that blossomed when I gave birth to my own child, back in Virginia, many years and miles away. My experience of grief, shock and isolation as a new mother was not unique. And it wasn’t just my family, but seemingly everyone’s family, that disintegrated over the past fifty years in America. The anguish of this early imprint sparked a thousand questions when I failed to find or create my own extended family after my son’s birth. (Read Lisa’s stories about her quest here.)

Over the years when I would return to my grandmother’s home, I would look around through the eyes of an adult, trying to understand what happened. My grandmother served as a constant, an unchanging and clear model for something that I often believed I must have imagined. Sometimes I felt like a time traveler returning to Brigadoon, hoping to glimpse once again insight into an age, or time, that most people believed impossible, sentimental or unworthy of our efforts anymore.

Sometimes I wondered if my grandmother descended from a different species of humans. Her insight was uncanny and her willingness to share it in her quiet voice, unnerving. When I handed her the newspaper clipping of my fiancé proposing to me she said, “Huh, he’s in armor… and your shoe is coming off like you’re going to run away.” Yes, that’s right, he’s an emotional fortress and I’m an escape artist and this will be the dynamic of our relationship for the next three decades. As a Missionary Baptist, my grandmother would disapprove of the idea of divination, but at a glance, she saw through two kids on a bridge romanticizing the mine fields that lay before them. (See the photo of Lisa’s engagement to Keith to the right and read her story here.)

As a part of my quest to learn to farm sustainably, in 2007 I visited her after spending a few days learning about biodynamics at an institute near her home. I sat at the dining room table with her, the one with the giant lion paw pedestal that frightened me so badly as a child I knelt in my chair, unwilling to risk dangling my toes near the massive claws. She asked me what I had learned about farming at the institute and, trying to respect what I thought may be her beliefs around fairies, moon phases and stars, I lightly skimmed the surface in my explanations. But when I looked up, her eyes were sparkling.

“My daddy planted by the stars,” she said, seeming to also hold back the whole truth of this ancient farming knowledge for fear of offending some modern taboo or invisible room monitor. “And the brownies.”

This is the same Ramon’s calendar my grandmother handed to me in 2007. I’ve kept it in my desk for a decade, knowing I would share this story eventually.

Now wait, I thought. Brownies? Fairies? She stood up and, with her hallmark intentional and measured pace, walked toward the wall near the refrigerator and pulled down the calendar and handed it to me. At first I stared at the red ink calendar unremarkably. It was the same brand that always hung in her kitchen, so unchanged year to year you’d have to look close to make sure it was a new year: Ramon’s Brownie Calendar. But then I saw them: brownies and moon phases and planetary symbols sprinkled through daily date boxes. Perhaps this was as far as modern sensibilities or churches would allow some to go, but clearly those who knew the meaning and connection of these symbols KNEW… there was a greater intelligence to work with above and below the soil and most of our ancestors would have perished without this knowledge and wisdom.

There were other times I visited my grandmother and would not dare share my latest mindful meditation retreat, but watched her with wonder as she clearly already practiced, I don’t know, prayer? Something, something that allowed her to possess and know her own mind. Never hurried, she stunned me with her casual ability to say, “Well, I got to studying on this and…” To me, she appeared to know when she was shifting into a thinking brain and then back to the present moment, and without spending all of that money on books, tapes and retreats!

The Imprint’s Impulse

On my last visit to her home last year, she leaned forward and asked pointedly, “Do you let your doctor give you a flu shot?”

“Well, that doctor keeps trying to give me one and I told him I haven’t had the flu since the Spanish Flu in 1920.” I tried to imagine a shot-pushing medical doctor taking on my 85-pound grandmother and immediately felt sorry for him.

Still smiling from her tale of surviving the Spanish Flu, my grandmother leaned forward, crooked her finger at me and pointed my twin aunts toward the back of the house. Once in her bedroom, we gathered around the high post bed she worked to buy for herself before marrying my grandfather in 1939. Three years later, she gave birth to my father in this bed. This is how everything is in my grandmother’s house: everything is a story, brimming with meaning and purpose. When a coffee cup’s handle broke off decades ago, it became the egg cup and is still in its rightful place in the cupboard.

Because nothing is ever fussed over, or ceremonial, sometimes I find it hard to determine how to respond to my grandmother. So when she pulled out a bag of quilted squares and told me it was the last quilt she began before my grandfather passed suddenly from a heart attack in 1985, I just nodded my head and said thank you. One of my aunts pointed out the colorful Ohio stars were lovingly hand-stitched from my grandfather’s shirts. I thanked her again and carefully carried the bag home, wondering what I should do with them as I hadn’t sewn since I was a child, and then just quilts and clothes for my doll.

Then I remember the pile of little boy shirts at the back of my son’s closet. Oh gosh, I forgot. All through my son’s boyhood I collected and saved his plaid shirts with the hope of creating a quilt for him and his children. It was almost an unconscious act. An impulse from a deep well of women harkening back, how many generations? An impulse straight out of that early imprint: Well, of course this is what you do. You save good shirts and make something else from them… something that echoes through time and generations the connection and love you shared together and now pass on to them.

I have tried to calculate the ways my grandmother’s quiet, meaningful life impacted my own, but there is so much woven into the fabric of my own being, I doubt I will ever know.

When I returned home, I found a local quilting guild who happily blew up my phone with emails, texts and calls when I asked for help. The quilter who showed up patted me on the back when I cried, blubbering that these quilt squares were my grandfather’s shirts and hand-sewn by my grandmother, so did she want to make the quilt on the living room floor where I could watch? Kindly, she explained the modern process of pulling the quilt through a large machine in her “studio” as she was a real artist. And she was. You can see the quilt in the photos above, and the lovely caption tag sewn on the edge to tell everyone, “Pieced by Ida from Walter’s shirts.” (Thank you Ann Philbeck for creating this quilt for my family to cherish!)

My Grandma Is Not A Hippie

My grandmother lived in a log house, survived the Spanish Flu, grew, harvested and canned her own food, made her family’s clothes and quilts, birthed at home, is mindful of her thoughts, and yet, my grandma is not a hippie. But I, as her granddaughter trying to understand and emulate her life, have been called a hippie and worse for two decades. I don’t feel like a radical doing this work. I’ve always felt like I just wanted to go home, and to take everyone with me.

How odd. We’ve come so far, for better or worse, as a culture in a century, but my grandmother is still the same. She is herself.

My grandmother, Ida Dorothy Hodges Stone, may be the most sane, whole, human and evolved person I know – even though she may frown on the evolved idea. It seems like I have spent my entire life, and certainly my life as a mother, trying to have my grandmother’s life, trying to become this whole person I see as possible when I am with her.

My son left for college this past year. His boyhood shirts are still waiting for me to create a memory quilt, and I will someday, but for now, my Mother (of a) Quest is over. Now I have a new quest, also inspired by my grandmother: How to be, to possess myself, while the world changes continuously all around me?

Surry County, North Caroline, my grandmother’s home and home to the fictional town of Mayberry in the iconic Andy Griffith Show, was not spared from global markets, the decline of family farms and the disintegration of family and community life. Documentary filmmaker, Bill Hayes, captures the small town’s decline and rebirth in his film, The Real Mayberry: Stories from Small Town America (see the trailer below). I spoke with him last year about his project and its mission to explore “how small town America can survive and keep its heart and soul.”

Knowing if you’re from the same neck of the woods, you’re most likely connected somehow, I asked my grandmother about Bill and his family. In an email exchange, I shared the predictable story of our connection with him: my uncle played piano at his wedding and my grandmother and her sister used to visit his mother in his father’s hardware store. His mother “worked on people’s feet,” as a healer of sorts.

Hayes’ film captures the devastation of the small town’s economy, as clothing mills moved out of the country for cheaper labor. The film flashes to scenes from the Andy Griffith Show (Mayberry is named after Mount Airy and is the real home of actor Andy Griffith) and shows how Mount Airy is experiencing a rebirth. Or trying.

Is Conscious Parenting Elitist? In America, Yes.

It is this piece of the quest for holistic, sustainable, peaceful living that escapes some of us – the reality of the context of our lives and how it is determined by forces often beyond our control, and some beneath or above our culturally conditioned consciousness. In the early days of mother activism, I often heard people criticized Families for Conscious Living (the parent nonprofit group of Kindred) for “being too political.” Now, it is becoming culturally imperative and encouraged to examine and own one’s “privilege,” or how the deck was stacked for or against you from the beginning of your life.

The Machine That Goes “Bing!” from Monty Python’s movie, The Meaning of Life. Click image to watch the film skit.

Reading last month’s wildly popular ProPublica piece on why the US is the official “worst place in the world to give birth” I felt disoriented, as if reality continually collides with a cartoon world. The study’s revelation that doctors are fascinated with technology and ignoring mothers is a surreal echo from Monty Python’s movie The Meaning of Life, where, in one scene, a mother in labor is ignored while a group of male doctors and a hospital administrator speak reverently about the new “machine that goes bing!”

“People became really enchanted with the ability to do ultrasound, and then high-resolution ultrasound, to do invasive procedures, to stick needles in the amniotic cavity,” said William Callaghan chief of the CDC’s Maternal and Infant Health Branch.

“Bing!”

Over the years, my return visits to my grandmother’s home became a benchmark for my own spiraling feeling of mangled despair and failure at recreating the experience of my childhood. I feel this failure is profound and debilitating for many of us, even those who did not have a grandmother’s role model life – or the life of someone who is connected to their own minds, souls, then family and earth. Maybe connection was easier a century ago. Maybe the imprints of our ancestors on our psyches still guide us toward a better world.

Listen to The Blueprint, with Ray Castellino.

If you listen to Ray Castellino in Kindred’s video interview, you’ll hear the sound of something beneath and surrounding our imprints, something he calls our Blueprint: the unifying field we all carry with us as a “reference point” for returning home to ourselves, especially after trauma, or just the daily experience of living in a disconnected, industrial culture.

I believe we are nurtured, supported and loved in the cells and souls of our being more than we know, or can imagine. As the grandfather of the conscious parenting movement, Joseph Chilton Pearce, shared in his lifetime of work, it just takes that one attuned adult in our lives to help us realize our own capacity for wholeness and wellness.

Gratefully, my imprint-driven twenty year Mother (of a) Quest did yield evidence of a growing conscious living/parenting movement, and a dynamic network of individuals and organizations in this consciousness-raising movement, whose scope is beyond returning to a way of life made culturally impossible today, and toward a future where we can, through many layers of connection, create sustainable humans, preconception and onward, as a path to a peaceful, sustainable world.

Originally and continually inspired by my grandmother, I have worked with professionals, parents and activists to collect and present these resources and hundreds of writers exploring the frontier of whole human consciousness as a path to peaceful and sustainable living. It has been an epic and ongoing adventure. (Listen to Lisa’s presentation on the New Story of Childhood, Parenthood and the Human Family that shares some of her discoveries here.)

Happy 99th Birthday, Grandma. Thank you for the role model of your life, your love and your being that you shared so generously with me and our family for nearly a century. We love you.

]]>http://kindredmedia.org/2017/06/grandma-not-hippie/feed/0Playful Wisdom: A Father’s Adventurehttp://kindredmedia.org/2017/06/playful-wisdom-fathers-adventure/
http://kindredmedia.org/2017/06/playful-wisdom-fathers-adventure/#respondSun, 04 Jun 2017 16:12:52 +0000http://kindredmedia.org/?p=20389LIMITED TIME OFFER: Order a first edition, autographed hard copy of Playful Wisdom and receive a soft copy FREE. Reserve your order here. Playful Wisdom Asks: What About Fathers? The neuroscience is conclusive: child development is model dependent. Ideally then, the focus of early childhood development would be to optimize the model-environment each parent represents. […]

]]>LIMITED TIME OFFER: Order a first edition, autographed hard copy of Playful Wisdom and receive a soft copy FREE. Reserve your order here.

Playful Wisdom Asks: What About Fathers?

The neuroscience is conclusive: child development is model dependent. Ideally then, the focus of early childhood development would be to optimize the model-environment each parent represents. Most of the attention and preparation that pregnancy, birth and bonding imply focus on the mother. Then it is all about ‘the baby’. But what about fathers? The role that fathers play is often dwarfed by comparison, historically little more than a pat on the back and a cigar. Yet, the strength, active participation and support each father provides creates a foundation upon which the entire enterprise rests. Imagine each father being as aware, practiced and present, as many are approaching a three-foot putt, when relating to mother and baby during the most critical and formative months of his child’s life. Imagine each father discovering something new about himself every step of the way as he guides and mentors his child’s explosive self-discover. This is what being a father means today and the vision and practice Playful Wisdom invites.

Playful Wisdom is the synthesis of raising three children, now ages forty, thirty and currently two-point-five, plus over thirty-five years researching, writing and interviewing hundreds of top experts in the field, including Joseph Chilton Pearce, author of thirteen books on expansive human potential, and Bev Bos, founder and director of the Roseville Community Preschool, a keynote presenter at over 6,000 professional workshops for childcare providers and early childhood education. The passion and insights of both are featured extensively.

Order your hard copy of Playful Wisdom and receive a soft copy FREE.

From the foreword by Gabor Maté M.D.

We now know that early experiences largely determine our worldview, sense of ourselves, capacity for relationships, self-concept, mental-emotional balance and, indeed, the very neurobiology of our brains. As a seminal article in the journal Pediatrics pointed out, “The interaction of genes and experiences literally shapes the circuitry of the developing brain, and is critically influenced by the mutual responsiveness of adult-child relationships, particularly in the early childhood years…” The most poignant passages in the book reflect Michael’s willingness to be transformed by his interactions with his daughter, by the life wisdom the child naturally embodies when invited to be herself in the presence of a loving adult who knows when to guide and when to be guided. “As I witness and strive to nurture Carly’s next self- discovery, she is doing the same for me, she at her stage of unfoldment and me at mine,” he writes. “We are each providing for the other the precise catalyst, overflowing with care and boundless affection, needed for the others continuing unfoldment.”

About the author

Michael Mendizza is an author, educator, documentary filmmaker, stage and screenwriter and founder of Touch the Future, a nonprofit learning design center. He is the author of four books: Playful Wisdom: A Father’s Adventure; Magical Parent-Magical Child: The Art of Joyful Parenting; Flowering, a collection of floral and seascape images with quotes by Krishnamurti; and Always Awakening: Buddha’s Realization Krishnamurti’s Insight with Rinpoche Samdhong, with a foreword by His Holiness the Dalai Lama. Michael and his wife share two art galleries that feature designer jewelry, Czech art glass and photography.

“I love it! Playful Wisdom is an oasis of beauty in a time of insanity. Michael invites us to a most private sanctum, there to discover a universal realm of connection and knowledge. He moves from the intimate to the global, from the personal to the political. His baby whispers a timeless teaching and he listens. In between are quotes from wisdom-keepers and powerful insights from modern science. Michael champions direct sensory love; don’t let gadgetry stand between you and your child, between your child and the world! I thank Michael for the stand he takes: an empathic society begins with how we connect with our children. Playful Wisdom is for all parents who want to learn what their child has come to teach them.”

Robin Grille
Psychologist, author of Parenting for a Peaceful World and Heart-to-Heart Parenting.

Playful Wisdom is an intimate journal of an intimate adventure that transforms everyone who takes it. Helping along the way are insights from two of the most respected specialists of our time; Bev Bos and Joseph Chilton Pearce. Playful Wisdom is a meditation, a precious reminder to be touched every day with amazement and wonder, to be innocent once again, this time with wisdom as our wings.

“Playful Wisdom is, in a word, fantastic. It weaves together the writings, passion and insights of three well-known and respected experts in the field of child education and development: Joseph Chilton Pearce, Bev Bos, and Michael Mendizza. Bos and Pearce are featured guests. Carly, Michael’s new daughter, is the star. On the left pages you will find beautiful and revealing color images of Carly accompanied by quotes from Pearce or Bos. On the right is Michael’s intimate and inspiring narrative. The book could stand alone with just the quotes from Bos and Pearce, or the eloquent text of Mendizza, or the beautiful and inspiring pictures of Carly. The synergy of all four is both powerful and engaging. Playful Wisdom is brilliant and inspiring. It rests permanently with my collection of treasured books.”

William R. Emerson, PhD.
A renowned workshop leader, writer, lecturer, and pioneer in the field of pre and perinatal psychology. He is among the first in the world to develop prenatal and perinatal treatment methods for infants and children, is an expert in treatment methods for adults, and is recognized world-wide for his contributions. He is also president emeritus of APPPAH, the Association for Prenatal and Perinatal Psychology and Health.

“Playful Wisdom is an amazing mosaic of love, wisdom and play, driven by the deep care-taking, hard-wired stuff that is so often suppressed in our materialistic, technological, anti-nature culture. That, plus the years of sage explorations that brought Michael to this place in his remarkable life makes Playful Wisdom a must read for anyone who cares about the future of our children.”

Stuart Brown, MD.
Author, PBS Producer and Founder of the National Institute for Play.
Stuart is play researcher who writes, speaks, consults and educates organizations, corporations, universities, and public policy makers about the importance of play in our lives and the unexpected, serious consequences that occur when play is neglected.

“Playful Wisdom: A Father’s Adventure is a feast, three wonderful books woven together. First, Michael Mendizza has explored the leading edge of human potential. From this deep wisdom and heart he tells the story of his daughter, Carly Elizabeth, and their first two years together. Second, Michael shares what he has learned from his three plus decades of inquiry, with insights from Joseph Chilton Pearce, Allan Schore, James W. Prescott, Bev Bos and many others—by describing his own integral understanding and analysis. Third, given that Joe Pearce offered the most profound insights into human development of the past 40 years, the excerpts Michael offers are a gift for those who have read all of Pearce’s books or for those who will come to this wisdom for the first time.”

David Marshak, Ed.D.
President (CEO), SelfDesign Graduate Institute.
SelfDesign promotes authentic self-discovery and respect for the rights of all learners, young and old, to assume responsibility for their own learning paths.

“Playful Wisdom gives us a rare glimpse into what the role of a father can be! Michael describes going to a restaurant and sitting his daughter Carly on the table so her eyes were at the same level with everyone else. I knew then he was being the kind of father every child would want. Michael was allowing Carly to grow and develop on her own timeline by loving, protecting, and respecting her authentic nature. Even more, he shows the importance of a father’s role in the life of every child. I wish I had a father like that. Carly will not waste her precious life developing skills to overcome the obstacles many parents impose on their children. She will simply to be in the glory of who she naturally is. Playful Wisdom is a gift to every new parent, grandparent, to anyone who cares about children.”

“Michael’s insights and participation as his new daughter Carly explores and integrates her world have profound implications for providing a positive future for every child, and by extension, the fate of human civilization. Playful Wisdom opens wide the doors perception into the new field of behavioral epigenetics, the science of how environment and our perception of the environment are responsible for controlling our genetic activity and health. Michael’s parenting studies are particularly relevant given our new understanding that late in life dysfunctions, such as cancer, obesity, and cardiovascular disease, are seeded by environmental influences experienced in infancy.”

“Opening our minds and hearts to the joyous, curious, playful, zen-like nature of children helps us remember what it means to be “fully alive.” Playful Wisdom: A Father’s Adventure is delightful, especially the inclusions of Joe Pearce and Bev Bos as well as the skillful integration of the science that illustrates the remarkable development of a child’s brain. Michael’s synthesis helps us better understand how miraculous children really are and how important it is that we nurture them to reach their full potential. Our future depends on it!”

]]>http://kindredmedia.org/2017/06/playful-wisdom-fathers-adventure/feed/0What Is Self-Directed Education?http://kindredmedia.org/2017/05/self-directed-education/
http://kindredmedia.org/2017/05/self-directed-education/#respondThu, 11 May 2017 17:11:49 +0000http://kindredmedia.org/?p=20161Imagine what would happen if, instead of sending children to coercive schools where their natural ways of learning are curtailed, we provided them with the resources that would allow their curiosity, playfulness, and other natural ways of learning to flourish. That is Self-Directed Education (SDE); education that derives from the self-chosen activities and life experiences […]

Imagine what would happen if, instead of sending children to coercive schools where their natural ways of learning are curtailed, we provided them with the resources that would allow their curiosity, playfulness, and other natural ways of learning to flourish. That is Self-Directed Education (SDE); education that derives from the self-chosen activities and life experiences of the learner.

The Alliance for Self-Directed Education is a nonprofit organization dedicated to normalizing and legitimizing Self-Directed Education, to make it available to everyone who seeks it. We invite you to join.

What Is Self-Directed Education?

Education that derives from the self-chosen activities and life experiences of the person being educated.

Let’s start with the term education. In everyday language people tend to equate education with schooling, which leads one to think of education as something that is done to students by teachers. Teachers educate and students become educated. Teachers give an education and students receive this gift. But any real discussion of education requires us to think of it as something much broader than schooling.

Education is the sum of everything a person learns that enables that person to live a satisfying and meaningful life.

Education can be defined broadly in a number of ways. A useful definition for our purposes is this: Education is the sum of everything a person learns that enables that person to live a satisfying and meaningful life. This includes the kinds of things that people everywhere more or less need to learn, such as how to walk upright, how to speak their native language, how to get along with others, how to regulate their emotions, how to make plans and follow through on them, and how to think critically and make good decisions.

It also includes some culture-specific skills, such as, in our culture, how to read, how to calculate with numbers, how to use computers, maybe how to drive a car—the things that most people feel they need to know in order to live the kind of life they want to live in the culture in which they are growing up.

But much of education, for any individual, entails sets of skills and knowledge that may differ sharply from person to person, even within a given culture. As each person’s concept of “a satisfying and meaningful life” is unique, each person’s education is unique. Society benefits from such diversity.

Given this definition of education, Self-Directed Education is education that derives from the self-chosen activities and life experiences of the person becoming educated, whether or not those activities were chosen deliberately for the purpose of education.

Self-Directed Education can include organized classes or lessons, if freely chosen by the learner; but most Self-Directed Education does not occur that way. Most Self-Directed Education comes from everyday life, as people pursue their own interests and learn along the way. The motivating forces include curiosity, playfulness, and sociability—which promote all sorts of endeavors from which people learn. Self-Directed Education necessarily leads different individuals along different paths, though the paths may often overlap, as each person’s interests and goals in life are in some ways unique and in some ways shared by others.

Self-Directed Education can be contrasted to imposed schooling, which is forced upon individuals, regardless of their desire for it, and is motivated by systems of rewards and punishments, as occurs in conventional schools. Imposed schooling is generally aimed at enhancing conformity rather than uniqueness, and it operates by suppressing, rather than nurturing, the natural drives of curiosity, playfulness, and sociability.

Resources

]]>http://kindredmedia.org/2017/05/self-directed-education/feed/0The Conscious Parenting Movement Goes To The UN!http://kindredmedia.org/2017/05/conscious-parenting-movement-goes-un/
http://kindredmedia.org/2017/05/conscious-parenting-movement-goes-un/#respondWed, 10 May 2017 00:52:04 +0000http://kindredmedia.org/?p=20181The Conscious Parenting Movement – based on attachment science, neurobiolgy and brain development and founded organically by multiple pioneers and organizations over 30 years ago as a consciousness-raising movement – arrived at the United Nations this past February in the form of an international alliance of nonprofit and educational organizations under the banner of CEPP, […]

The Conscious Parenting Movement – based on attachment science, neurobiolgy and brain development and founded organically by multiple pioneers and organizations over 30 years ago as a consciousness-raising movement – arrived at the United Nations this past February in the form of an international alliance of nonprofit and educational organizations under the banner of CEPP, Childhood and Early Parenting Principles.

In this interview with Valerie Unite, the founder of CEPPs, the listener learns of the exciting networking and information exchanges currently taking place at the UN, the necessity of helping governments, cities and communities develop effective and cost-saving programs based on conscious parenting principles, and the plan going forward.

A Worldwide Need

The worldwide need for CEPPs is multi-faceted, highlighted by studies of the social and economic impacts in diverse areas such as:

Pre-conception Care and Education – Pre-conception care is the provision of biomedical, behavioural and social health interventions to women and couples before conception occurs. Perinatal deaths are 50% higher among children born to mothers under 20 years of age compared to mothers aged 20–29 years. Read more.

Maternal Mental Health – Perinatal mental health problems are very common, affecting up to 20% of women at some point during the perinatal period. They are of major importance because they have been shown to compromise the healthy emotional, cognitive and even physical development of the child, with serious long-term consequences. These factors are not yet fully acknowledged and adequately integrated into policy making. Read more.

Premature Birth – Each year, some 15 million babies in the world, more than one in 10 births, are born too early. More than one million of those babies die shortly after birth; countless others suffer some type of lifelong physical, neurological, or educational disability. Read more.

Poverty – More than 60% of preterm births occur in Africa and South Asia, but preterm birth is truly a global problem. In the lower-income countries, on average, 12% of babies are born too early compared with 9% in higher-income countries. Within countries, poorer families are at higher risk. Read more.

Building healthier, fairer and more peaceful societies

It may be surprising to find criminologists teaming up with specialists in early childhood development to fight crime and improve levels of safety in society. But at the 2017 Stockholm Symposium on Criminology in June, a key component of the programme will be early intervention, with a focus on mothers and families.

This year Queen Silvia of Sweden will present the prestigious Stockholm Prize in Criminology to Professor Richard E. Tremblay (Canada/France/Ireland) for his work in developing basic science connections between biological, family and social factors in human development. Prof. Tremblay combines this research with rigorous tests of policies that may alter these factors to reduce crime and violence.

Early intervention during pregnancy helps control aggressive behaviour

His studies show that the benefits of nurture merit early intervention programmes, regardless of the uncertainties in the biological part of the story. And his research shows that earlier intervention may produce even better results. “If we support these parents during pregnancy and if we help these women have a better lifestyle during pregnancy, with less stress, it should affect brain development, and these children should be better able to learn how to control their aggressive behaviour,” he says.

The CEPPs framework for implementation of ECD programmes

Valerie Unite, CEPPs founder featured in the interview above, was invited to the symposium to introduce the Childhood and Early Parenting Principles (CEPPs), a policy framework for the implementation of early childhood development programmes. The CEPPs Mother and Child Manifesto is a set of 7 principles that form the basis for a unified multi-sector and multi-stakeholder partnership between government, private sector and civil society organizations.

These principles aim to do for mothers, families and young children what the Women’s Empowerment Principles (WEPs) are doing for women in the workplace. They have the single aim of ensuring that every child grows in a safe and nurturing environment and develops to their full potential.

CEPPs works bottom-up, city-by-city promoting multi-stakeholder networks to accelerate the implementation of the UN Every Woman, Every Child Global Strategy (2016-2030).

This framework incorporates the work of pioneers in the field of pre- and perinatal psychology like Dr. David Chamberlain, Dr.Thomas Verny and Dr. Rupert Linder. Extracts of their work over a period of 30 years will be found in Articles and Papers pages on the CEPPs website.

As Mahatma Gandhi said, “if there is to be peace in the world, we must begin with the children”.

Too many children are not thriving and are just surviving, too many parents and expectant parents need help and support. How can we hope for peace if peace if peace is not engrained during the very early years of a child, and even earlier, in the womb, as a normal and natural state?

We strongly believe that support for early parenting and early child care and education can have a lifelong impact on a child’s physical, emotional and mental health, and that is why we invite you to support our Manifesto, to share it with your friends and colleagues, and together we can do great things to build healthier, fairer and more peaceful societies!

“At the level of the individual, early childhood provides a unique opportunity to address issues that would contribute to transform the culture of war to a culture of peace…

The events that a child experiences early in life, the education that the child receives, and the community activities and social and social mind-set in which a child is immersed, all contribute to values, attitudes, traditions, modes of behaviour, and ways of life develop.”

LISA: I am very excited to be here with you. I need to share a story with our readers, so they understand the relevance of CEPPs and your work. Almost twenty years ago, I sat at a public park with a group of mothers in Virginia – one of the first Families for Conscious Living community groups. We were studying attachment science and neurobiology and brain development as it related to nurturing our babies and trying to figure out how to incorporate these mostly unstated principles. Attachment Parenting International, API, was just coming out at that time as well, but there was very little cultural support at all much less public policy support for what became known as the conscious parenting movement.

And, so the reason I am so excited to talk with you today is that you and your partners have created CEPPs and they are bringing forward the science-based insights of conscious parenting to the U.N., which in our culture is about as top of the pyramid as you can get, and you are working with international organizations there to bring recognition to these principles. So, this is amazing progress in 20 years. (Listen to FCL’s history here, read our historical and archived 10th anniversary newsletter here.)

VALERIE: That is correct, yes. We started last year and I really thought I would gather some major partners of the fields and of the perinatal and prenatal, so we last year when I went to the U.N. in New York it all started there, and we just decided to partner and to propose a framework called the Childhood and Early Parenting Principles as a complementary approach to the existing frameworks. With this framework are seven principles that really form the basis for a unified partnership between governments, private sector, civil organizations, and nonprofit organizations. I think that is what is really, really very interesting and something quite new in fact.

LISA: It is new, and I am very encouraged by the fact that is based on the WEPs model, which I would like for you to talk to us about – but also to talk to us about this blind spot with the Women Empowerment Principles that exists. So tell us first about WEPs and how that was useful in creating CEPPs.

VALERIE: Yes, of course. The WEPs are the Women Empowerment Principles. I came in to contact with this organization because I was part of another NGO at that time, and these Women Empowerment Principles have been defined as a framework to help and support women, but in the workplace in the world, and it is very successful. It has been now more than 10 years that they have focused on women in the workplace. I felt and realized that they were not really taking into consideration the role of mothers – and mothers and children are so important for the future of humanity. So, we decided to create something that was very close to the model of the Women Empowerment Principles and would define our set of principles that would really make a difference in the life of mothers and families and children in the world.

So, CEPPs has been able to define the business case and now we have exactly a business case for the mothers and children. Before that we had the science case, and we have the social case that really allow us to talk to the government and the government agency and say, look this is very, very crucial and important that you really take this public and implement policies so we build a healthier, fairer, more peaceful societies. CEPPs focuses on the child’s critical years from conception to age three, and we now know that during these windows of opportunity the brain develops faster than any other time in life. We really think these critical years are the foundation that shape a child’s future, physical, mental, emotional health with a lifelong impact. And not only for themselves, but for their communities and society. That is why we believe it is so, so important and we are so excited to work on that.

LISA: Oh, there are so many questions and there are so many pieces to talk about. First of all, I would like to say in the United States it is hard to imagine the excitement around attachment and science and brain development that exists in other countries because our culture here is so opposed to supporting mothers and families and, of course, we are at the bottom rankings for maternal and infant health among developed countries. So, it probably is hard to imagine how excited other countries are to meet with you at the platform there at the United Nations and how the hunger is there for this information, for the programs, for educational projects and just the exchange of what are you doing, what is working for you? Can you talk to us a little bit about that?

VALERIE: Yes, of course. I think now it becomes a worldwide awareness that really we need to, to support mothers and mothers-to-be and families. When I said mothers, I do include fathers, so I would say mothers and families and caregivers, and it is also a topic that is now becoming an important topic in the U.S. because it is so obvious that if we really want to have a more peaceful society we have to support the mothers because science and neuroscience tell us that, really the brain…the brain is building, you know, during the pregnancy so if we really want to help our society we have to help mothers so that mothers are able to bring to the world healthy, healthy babies and this is what we talk about now in the whole world, yes and many countries of course are more…are advanced on some policies, some are less advanced, but we learn from each other.

That is why we really want to meet and meet all of these different countries in the world and share the knowledge…the knowledge of best practices is really key to our initiative. And also, I think now we have some…some work where in America they are also able to say how important it is to invest…invest on mental health, for example, and maternal health because if you invest $1 you are able to save $7 to $10 for…in the future.

So this is really now a business case that policy makers are taking seriously, absolutely in the whole world. It is a long work though. It is not going to happen overnight, but…but now we have strong cases to invite our government to implement the policies that are really supporting, and…this case. So we work with policy makers, government, non-government, society stakeholders and professional associations, of course research associations, universities, institutions, absolutely. We want to include social care, early childhood care and development, and you know it is all about that. We are in touch with midwife organizations, nurses, doulas, GPs, obstetrician, gynecologists, pediatricians, mental health professionals. It is really a stakeholder initiative and we cannot afford to work in silos, and even at the U.N. level and at a very high level, the World Health Organization as well as UNICEF and U.N. they now want to work with the civil society of NGO as a multi-partner initiative and multi-sector and multi=stakeholder. We have to work all together on that.

LISA: If you are part of an organization in the United States, can you become a part of CEPPs and work with other organizations internationally on bringing the principles sort of down the chain?

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VALERIE: Yes, yes absolutely you can…you can join our global initiative. We propose a collaborative platform in each country and we have, our partners are already in different countries in the world and our founding partners also can work with organizations in their country like APPPAH, for example in the USA so these organizations can connect with APPPAH and also they would be connected with our network. So on our website you will have all the information on that, but definitely we welcome any professional organization to join and to share their knowledge with us and also one very important thing is that we would like to share this knowledge with developing countries, you know, because we are…most of our partners are living in developed countries but there is a huge need for developing countries to receive some help and support. So, this is where we can bring a lot and this is where I would like to focus this year, to reach out and connect with other organizations in the developed…developing countries, so we are able to bring them the knowledge and the experience that they need. So this is really, really exciting.

LISA: It is very exciting, and I would just like to underline what you are talking about with this ability to network at this top level by providing an example. Kindred has on our board Teresa Graham Brett who is the author of Parenting for Social Change. She is also a Dean of Students at the University of Arizona and practicing attorney, and she was contacted by an organization of parents who had created their own nonprofit in South Africa a few years ago. You can read these stories on Kindred, by the way, at kindredmedia.org But they have been working together for a number of years to bring to South Africa through the nonprofit structure of Kindred. You know, this is a piece that became quite an eye opener when we started structuring for ourselves these organizational containers that were necessary in order to have some of these exchanges happen in this legitimate and supportive way.

I have watched as Teresa has worked with APEA, which is the Alliance for Parent Education in Africa and it has been…and I know you have been introduced to them, but I think about how much easier it would have been if there had been some larger container for international organizations to go to right away to get the materials that they need, and this…the Parent Liberation Alliance is Kindred’s arm for doing this, but it…it is just something that came from the need of the conscious parenting movement – which is just this organic consciousness raising phenomenon that has been going on for decades now. And so there were people showing up to fill these little vacuums, but to have this top level effective global initiative and roundtable that people can more easily find materials…and this is just…it is just very exciting, Valerie. I am so grateful for all of your work.

VALERIE: Yes, this is really something very, very important that is very dear to my heart. We really want to and we need to connect with this country and Africa and also in Asia, I am amazed by the work there is to do in Asia also and in South Africa…I visit South Africa regularly and I will be in touch with more organizations and also South America, this is a very, very important place to be to help. I know there are some programs already in some countries like Chile and Brazil, but clearly we need to…we need to reach the top level, you know the government, and invite them to clearly make a strong, you know, statement of support and…so that they can implement the policy that we are proposing, and we now have two movements.

We have a top down movement from the U.N., UNICEF, the World Health Organization, but they need the civil society and they need NGOs to really…from the grassroots level to help them in implementing, so I was very, very interested to realize that they need us more than we think in fact, so this is where we have a huge role to play and we can bring a lot there. And our contribution will be absolutely…absolutely crucial. This is something that I learned and I am really convinced of that.

LISA: Wow, okay…

VALERIE: So really want to try to mobilize, you know, organizations and individuals with this objective of building a multisector, multi stakeholder network also at the city, if possible city and county levels, city and region levels. We also have a program we are working on this year called the CEPPs friendly cities. It is a program in order to promote the creation of city level networks, you know, of actors in the field of health, education, social service involved in maternal…physical and mental health and early childhood development so that we can promote the sharing of best policy.

Cities will share between themselves, you know, best practices between these networks. So this is something that we are working on and we are very happy with that…so that some cities will be able…(inaudible) program will be able to help other cities in other countries to…to implement these roadmaps. We have a roadmap; we have a 10-step roadmap that can help the implementation, so we are very, very busy with that but so, so happy and we will regularly also attend the United Nations meetings so that we can share, you know, this experience and also meet people like, you know, organizations involved in the same field we can meet and share our experiences, so this is very, very interesting.

It is so fulfilling to do that. The time is now, you know. There is a grand convergence and we all realize that this is absolutely crucial. I mean, children are really the future of humanity and the mothers play the crucial role, and they should be recognized for this role. So this is how we think and we hope CEPPs can make a difference in the lives of women, young children, and we want to scale up the implementation of the SDG, the Sustainable Development Goals defined by the United Nations. Our program is following these seven principles, SDG, and so, yeah we have a great roadmap from this top down intuitive by the U.N. and we try to bring in our contribution, yeah absolutely.

LISA: So where do people go to find CEPPs and what will they find on your website. You have kind of told us a little bit but where can they go?

VALERIE: Yeah, so they can go to our website cepprinciples.org They will find on the homepage they will find different topics and the manifesto as well as our flyer and 10-steps and roadmap they will find in the CEPPs toolkit, CEPPs implementation toolkit. They will have some flyers and different languages and they have the manifesto there, the presentation also and our CEPPs agenda, so it is all there. We also have a very good resources with our CEPPs directory and articles and papers about prenatal, perinatal, maternal mental health also, bonding attachment, breastfeeding. And we really cover all of those very important topics, and we explain what our four pillars are. You know, we have four pillars which are…understand and share the knowledge worldwide, engage with policy makers at the highest level, and then we wish to empower communities to engage with policy makers and then realize the vision for a fairer society.

So all of that is contained in our toolkit and resources page, so yes we are really happy if people could join and also we invite them to come to our website. We created a café, a café which is like a meeting place where people can join, ask questions, post comments, and so that is also what we would like to do. We are also building a forum discussion whereby people would come and share and ask questions and we are happy to respond. So, that is also something on our website. We also have a Facebook page. You will have the CEPPs Facebook page, and we post regularly and you can of course contact us, ask any question that you have and we are happy to respond. Absolutely…there is a lot to discuss of course.

LISA: From a little park in Virginia to the grassroots consciousness-raising movement to the UN. Before our recorded call, we talked about the networking that has happened at the U.N. with other international organizations and that piece of it is always very exciting to me. I still maintain that it is a little hard to see the conscious parenting movement in the United States but it is there, and you certainly can go to kindredmedia.org and read all about it and see our partners…our pioneering partners that have been with us for about 20 years now, including APPPAH. APPPAH is predating all of us I think at about 32 years, the Association for Prenatal and Perinatal Psychology and Health who presented with you in February at the U.N., right?

VALERIE: Yes, absolutely. They are a founding partner of our…of our work, and they have done a huge contribution to the work, and yes they were with us at the United Nations of February at the Commission for Social Development and I think and I hope they will be there next year. We are going to start working on that as well. Absolutely, it is all about networking and sharing the knowledge worldwide and it is really…we really feel it is the big momentum at the moment. All of the organizations feel the need to unite, you know, together and have the same common framework and the common unifying approach. That is really what we feel we need because if we have that we will be much more powerful when we talk to our governments, and so there is a need for that.

Absolutely, and so there is a lot of…a lot of passionate people involved in many areas of the prenatal and maternal health and perinatal. We all want the same thing, we just have to get organized, get together and every organization brings so much. We now have more than 30 organizations in our supporters and partners, more than 30 throughout the world and I am going to meet more in Asia and Africa so this is really, really exciting and I do hope America will join us and, you know, we will…it will happen, it will happen. I am sure it will happen with many organizations in America. We have…we have a few already among our supporters. It takes time of course. These things do not happen overnight, but we just have to start the movement and keep going and keep going and bring more evidence to the world. This is very, very, exciting and important. We really…I think…I feel when we meet at the U.N. and other international conferences we have the same goal. We want to build, you know, a healthier more peaceful society. We want peace and mothers play a huge role, and crucial role in that. So, yeah and I thank you so much for giving me the opportunity to be with you today because there is so much to do, so much to do.

LISA: Thank you, so tell me one more time what is the website.

VALERIE: Yes, the website address is cepprinciples.org

LISA: Thank you, Valerie.

VALERIE: Thank you, thank you, Lisa. Thank you, Lisa. Yes, and I hope we can talk again any time and I am happy to respond to any, any question you would have or inquiries from your members.

LISA: Right, we look forward to sharing your story on Kindred as you go along.

VALERIE: Well, thank you so much for the wonderful work you are doing, Lisa. This is really, this is really great.